IN HONOUR OF FRIENDSHIP
GLADSTONE—AFTER TWENTY YEARS
The 19th of May, 1898, was Ascension Day; and, just as the earliest
Eucharists were going up to God, William Ewart Gladstone passed out
of mortal suffering into the peace which passeth understanding. For
people who, like myself, were reared in the Gladstonian tradition,
it is a shock to be told by those who are in immediate contact with
young men that for the rising generation he is only, or scarcely,
a name. For my own part, I say advisedly that he was the finest
specimen of God's handiwork that I have ever seen; and by this
I mean that he combined strength of body, strength of intellect,
and spiritual attainments, in a harmony which I have never known
equalled. To him it was said when he lay dying, "You have so lived
and wrought that you have kept the soul alive in England." Of him
it was said a few weeks later, "On the day that Gladstone died
the world lost its greatest citizen." Mr. Balfour called him "the
greatest member of the greatest deliberative assembly that the
world has ever seen"; and Lord Salisbury said, "He will be long
remembered as a great example, to which history hardly furnishes
a parallel of a great Christian statesman."
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I have written so often and so copiously of Mr. Gladstone, who was
both my religious and my political leader, that I might have found
it difficult to discover any fresh aspects of his character and work;
but the Editor[*] has kindly relieved me of that difficulty. He has
pointed out certain topics which strikingly connect Gladstone's
personality with the events and emotions of the present hour. I
will take them as indicated, point by point.
1. THE LOVE OF LIBERTY.
I have never doubted that the master-passion of Gladstone's nature
was his religiousness—his intensely-realized relation with
God, with the Saviour, and with "the powers of the world to come."
This was inborn. His love of liberty was acquired. There was nothing
in his birth or education or early circumstances to incline him in
this direction. He was trained to "regard liberty with jealousy
and fear, as something which could not wholly be dispensed with,
but which was continually to be watched for fear of excesses."
Gradually—very gradually—he came to regard it as the
greatest of temporal blessings, and this new view affected every
department of his public life. In financial matters it led him
to adopt the doctrine of Free Exchanges. In politics, it induced
him to extend the suffrage, first to the artisan and then to the
labourer. In foreign affairs, it made him an unrelenting foe of
the Turkish tyranny. In Ireland,
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it converted him to Home Rule. In religion, it brought him nearer
and nearer to the ideal of the Free Church in the Free State.
2. BELGIUM AND THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR.
Gladstone hated war. He held, as most people hold, that there are
causes, such as Life and Home and Freedom, for which the gentlest
and most humane of men must be prepared to draw the sword. But he
was profoundly anxious that it should never be drawn except under
the absolute compulsion of national duty, and during the Crimean
War he made this memorable declaration:
"If, when you have attained the objects of the war, you continue
it for the sake of mere military glory, I say you tempt the justice
of Him in whose hands the fates of armies are as absolutely lodged
as the fate of the infant slumbering in its cradle."
This being his general view of war, it was inevitable that he should
regard with horror the prospect of intervention in the Franco-German
War, which broke out with startling suddenness, when he was Prime
Minister, in the summer of 1870. He strained every nerve to keep
England out of the struggle, and was profoundly thankful that Providence
enabled him to do so. Yet all through that terrible crisis he saw
quite clearly that either of the belligerent Powers might take
a step which would oblige England to intervene, and he made a
simultaneous agreement with Prussia and France that, if either violated
the neutrality of Belgium,
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England would co-operate with the other to defend the little State.
Should Belgium, he said, "go plump down the maw of another country
to satisfy dynastic greed," such a tragedy would "come near to
an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not think we
could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and independence was
in course of consummation."
3. WAR-FINANCE AND ECONOMY.
A colleague once said about Gladstone, "The only two things which
really interest him are Religion and Finance." The saying is much
too unguarded, but it conveys a certain truth. My own opinion is
that Finance was the field of intellectual effort in which his
powers were most conspicuously displayed; and it was always remarked
that, when he came to deal with the most prosaic details of national
income and expenditure, his eloquence rose to an unusual height and
power. At the same time, he was a most vigilant guardian of the
public purse, and he was incessantly on the alert to prevent the
national wealth, which his finance had done so much to increase,
from being squandered on unnecessary and unprofitable objects. This
jealousy of foolish expenditure combined with his love of peace
to make him very chary of spending money on national defences.
When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, his
eagerness in this regard caused his chief to write to the Queen
that "it would be better to lose Mr. Gladstone
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than to run the risk of losing Portsmouth or Plymouth." At the
end of his career, his final retirement was precipitated by his
reluctance to sanction a greatly increased expenditure on the Navy,
which the Admiralty considered necessary. From first to last he
sheltered himself under a dogma of his financial master—Sir
Robert Peel—to the effect that it is possible for a nation,
as for an individual, so to over-insure its property as to sacrifice
its income. "My name," he said at the end, "stands in Europe as
a symbol of the policy of peace, moderation, and non-aggression.
What would be said of my active participation in a policy that will
be taken as plunging England into the whirlpool of Militarism?"
4. ARBITRATION AND THE "ALABAMA."
Gladstone's hatred of war, and his resolve to avoid it at all hazards
unless national duty required it, determined his much criticized
action in regard to the Alabama. That famous and ill-omened
vessel was a privateer, built in an English dockyard and manned
by an English crew, which during the American Civil War got out
to sea, captured seventy Northern vessels, and did a vast deal of
damage to the Navy and commerce of the Union. The Government of
the United States had a just quarrel with England in this matter,
and the controversy—not very skilfully handled on either
side—dragged on till the two nations seemed to be on the edge
of war. Then Gladstone agreed to submit
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the case to arbitration, and the arbitration resulted in a judgment
hostile to England. From that time—1872—Gladstone's
popularity rapidly declined, till it revived, after an interval of
Lord Beaconsfield's rule, at the General Election of 1880. In the
first Session of that Parliament, he vindicated the pacific policy
which had been so severely criticized in the following words:
"The dispositions which led us to become parties to the arbitration
of the Alabama case are still with us the same as ever; we
are not discouraged, we are not damped in the exercise of these
feelings by the fact that we were amerced, and severely amerced,
by the sentence of the international tribunal; and, although we
may think the sentence was harsh in its extent and unjust in its
basis, we regard the fine imposed on this country as dust in the
balance compared with the moral value of the example set when these
two great nations of England and America, who are among the most
fiery and the most jealous in the world with regard to anything
that touches national honour, went in peace and concord before a
judicial tribunal to dispose of these painful differences, rather
than resort to the arbitrament of the sword."
5. NATIONALITY—THE BALKANS AND IRELAND.
Gladstone was an intense believer in the principle of nationality, and
he had a special sympathy with the struggles of small and materially
feeble States. "Let us recognize," he said, "and recognize with
frankness, the equality of the weak with the strong, the principles
of brotherhood among nations, and of their sacred independence.
When we are asking for the maintenance of the rights which belong
to our fellow-subjects, resident abroad, let us do as we would
be done by, and let us pay that respect
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to a feeble State, and to the infancy of free institutions, which
we would desire and should exact from others, towards their maturity
and their strength."
He was passionately Phil-Hellene. Greece, he said in 1897, is not
a State "equipped with powerful fleets, large armies, and boundless
treasure supplied by uncounted millions. It is a petty Power, hardly
counting in the list of European States. But it is a Power representing
the race that fought the battles of Thermopylæ and Salamis,
and hurled back the hordes of Asia from European shores."
Of the Christian populations in Eastern Europe which had the misfortune
to live under "the black hoof of the Turkish invader," he was the
chivalrous and indefatigable champion, from the days of the Bulgarian
atrocities in 1875 to the Armenian massacres of twenty years later.
"If only," he exclaimed, "the spirit of little Montenegro had animated
the body of big Bulgaria," very different would have been the fate
of Freedom and Humanity in those distracted regions. The fact that
Ireland is so distinctly a nation—not a mere province of Great
Britain—and the fact that she is economically poor, reinforced
that effort to give her self-government which had originated in
his late-acquired love of political freedom.
6. THE IDEA OF PUBLIC RIGHT.
Of the "Concert of Europe" as it actually lived and worked (however
plausible it might sound in theory) Gladstone had the poorest opinion,
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and, indeed, he declared that it was only another and a finer name for
"the mutual distrust and hatred of the Powers." It had conspicuously
failed to avert, or stop, or punish the Armenian massacres, and
it had left Greece unaided in her struggle against Turkey. Lord
Morley has finely said of him that "he was for an iron fidelity
to public engagements and a stern regard for public law, which is
the legitimate defence for small communities against the great and
powerful"; and yet again: "He had a vision, high in the heavens, of
the flash of an uplifted sword and the gleaming arm of the Avenging
Angel."
I have now reached the limits of the task assigned me by the Editor,
and my concluding word must be more personal.
I do not attempt to anticipate history. We cannot tell how much
of those seventy years of strenuous labour will live, or how far
Gladstone will prove to have read aright the signs of the times,
the tendencies of human thought, and the political forces of the
world. But we, who were his followers and disciples, know perfectly
well what we owe to him. If ever we should be tempted to despond
about the possibilities of human nature and human life, we shall
think of him and take courage. If ever our religious faith should
be perplexed by the
"Blank misgivings of a creature,
Moving about in worlds not realized,"
the memory of his strong confidence will reassure us. And if ever
we are told by the flippancy of
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scepticism that "Religion is a disease," then we can point to him
who, down to the very verge of ninety years, displayed a fulness
of vigorous and manly life beyond all that we had ever known.
HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND[*]
The Hollands spring from Mobberley, in Cheshire, and more recently
from the town of Knutsford, familiar to all lovers of English fiction
as "Cranford." They have made their mark in several fields of
intellectual effort. Lord Knutsford, Secretary of State for the
Colonies from 1887 to 1892, was a son of Sir Henry Holland, M.D.
(1788-1873), who doctored half the celebrities of Europe; and one of
Sir Henry's first cousins was the incomparable Mrs. Gaskell. Another
first-cousin was George Henry Holland (1818-1891), of Dumbleton Hall,
Evesham, who married in 1844 the Hon. Charlotte Dorothy Gifford,
daughter of the first Lord Gifford.
George Holland was an enthusiastic fox-hunter, and frequently changed
his abode for the better enjoyment of his favourite sport. In 1847
he was living at a place called Underdown, near Ledbury; and there,
on the 27th of January in that year, his eldest son was born.
The first Lord Gifford (1779-1826), who was successively Lord Chief
Justice and Master of the Rolls,
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had owed much in early life to the goodwill of Lord Eldon, and,
in honour of his patron, he named one of his sons' Scott. This
Scott Gifford was Mrs. George Holland's brother, and his name was
bestowed on her eldest son, who was christened "Henry Scott," but
has always been known by his second name. This link with George
III.'s Tory Chancellor is pleasingly appropriate.
Let it be remarked in passing that the hyphen so often introduced
into the name is solely a creation of the newspapers, which, always
rejoicing in double-barrelled surnames, gratify a natural impulse
by writing about "Canon Scott-Holland."
I regret that the most exhaustive research has failed to discover
any recorded traits of "Scotty" Holland in the nursery, but his
career in the schoolroom is less obscure. His governess was a Swiss
lady, who pronounced her young pupil "the most delightful of boys;
not clever or studious, but full of fun and charm." This governess
must have been a remarkable woman, for she is, I believe, the only
human being who ever pronounced Scott Holland "not clever." It
is something to be the sole upholder of an opinion, even a wrong
one, against a unanimous world. By this time George Holland had
established himself at Wellesbourne Hall, near Warwick, and there
his son Scott was brought up in the usual habits of a country home
where hunting and shooting are predominant interests. From the
Swiss lady's control he passed to a private school at Allesley,
near Coventry, and in January, 1860, he went to Eton. There he
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boarded at the house of Mrs. Gulliver,[*] and was a pupil of William
Johnson (afterwards Cory), a brilliant and eccentric scholar, whose
power of eliciting and stimulating a boy's intellect has never
been surpassed.
From this point onwards, Scott Holland's history—the formation
of his character, the development of his intellect, the place which he
attained in the regard of his friends—can be easily and exactly
traced; for the impression which he made upon his contemporaries has
not been effaced, or even dimmed, by the lapse of seven-and-forty
years.
"My recollection of him at Eton," writes one of his friends, "is
that of a boy most popular and high-spirited, strong, and full
of life; but not eminent at games." Another writes: "He was very
popular with a certain set, but not exactly eminent." He was not
a member of "Pop," the famous Debating Society of Eton, but his
genius found its outlet in other spheres. "He once astonished us
all by an excellent performance in some private theatricals in
his house." For the rest, he rowed, steered the Victory
twice, played cricket for his House, and fives and football, and
was a first-rate swimmer.
With regard to more important matters, it must suffice to say that
then, as always, his moral standard was the highest, and that no
evil thing dared manifest itself in his presence. He had been
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trained, by an admirable mother, in the best traditions of the
Tractarian school, and he was worthy of his training. Among his
intimate friends were Dalmeny, afterwards Lord Rosebery; Henry
Northcote, now Lord Northcote; Freddy Wood, afterwards Meynell;
Alberic Bertie; and Francis Pelham, afterwards Lord Chichester. He
left Eton in July, 1864, and his tutor, in a letter to a friend,
thus commented on his departure: "There was nothing to comfort me
in parting with Holland; and he was the picture of tenderness.
He and others stayed a good while, talking in the ordinary easy
way. M. L. came, and his shyness did not prevent my saying what
I wished to say to him. But to Holland I could say nothing; and
now that I am writing about it I cannot bear to think that he is
lost."
On leaving Eton, Holland went abroad to learn French, with an ultimate
view to making his career in diplomacy. Truly the Canon of St.
Paul's is an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown." What an Ambassador
he would have made! There is something that warms the heart in the
thought of His Excellency Sir Henry Scott Holland, G.C.B., writing
despatches to Sir Edward Grey in the style of The Commonwealth,
and negotiating with the Czar or the Sultan on the lines of the
Christian Social Union.
Returning from his French pilgrimage, he wept to a private tutor
in Northamptonshire, who reported that "Holland was quite unique
in charm and goodness, but would never be a scholar." In
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January, 1866, this charming but unscholarly youth went up to Balliol,
and a new and momentous chapter in his life began.
What was he like at this period of his life? A graphic letter just
received enables me to answer this question. "When I first met
him, I looked on him with the deepest interest, and realized the
charm that everyone felt. He had just gone up to Oxford, and was
intensely keen on Ruskin and Browning, and devoted to music. He
would listen with rapt attention when we played Chopin and Schumann
to him. I used to meet him at dinner-parties when I first came out,
by which time he was very enthusiastic on the Catholic side, and
very fond of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, and was also deeply moved by
social questions, East End poor, etc.; always unconventional, and
always passionately interested in whatever he talked of. Burne-Jones
once told me: 'It was perfectly delicious to see Holland come into a
room, laughing before he had even said a word, and always bubbling
over with life and joy.' Canon Mason said to me many years ago that
he had hoped I kept every scrap Scotty ever wrote to me, as he
was quite sure he was the most remarkable man of his generation.
But there was a grave background to all this merriment. I remember
that, as we were coming out of a London party, and looked on the
hungry faces in the crowd outside the door, I rather foolishly
said: 'One couldn't bear to look at them unless one felt that there
was another world for them.' He replied: 'Are we to have both, then?'
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I know how his tone and the look in his face haunted me more than
I can say."
A contemporary at Oxford writes, with reference to the same period:
"When we went up, Liddon was preaching his Bamptons, and we went
to them together, and were much moved by them. There were three
of us who always met for Friday teas in one another's rooms, and
during Lent we used to go to the Special Sermons at St. Mary's.
We always went to Liddon's sermons, and sometimes to his Sunday
evening lectures in the Hall of Queen's College. We used to go
to the Choral Eucharist in Merton Chapel, and, later, to the iron
church at Cowley, and to St. Barnabas, and enjoyed shouting the
Gregorians."
On the intellectual side, we are told that Holland's love of literature
was already marked. "I can remember reading Wordsworth with him,
and Carlyle, and Clough; and, after Sunday breakfasts, Boswell's
Life of Johnson." Then, as always, he found a great part
of his pleasure in music.
No record, however brief, of an undergraduate life can afford to
disregard athletics; so let it be here recorded that Holland played
racquets and fives, and skated, and "jumped high," and steered
the Torpid, and three times rowed in his College Eight.
He had innumerable friends, among whom three should be specially
recalled: Stephen Fremantle and R. L. Nettleship, both of Balliol,
and W. H. Ady, of Exeter. In short, he lived the life of the model
undergraduate, tasting all the joys of Oxford, and finding time
to spare for his prescribed
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studies. His first encounter with the examiners, in "Classical
Moderations," was only partially successful. "He did not appreciate
the niceties of scholarship, and could not write verses or do Greek
or Latin prose at all well;" and he was accordingly placed in the
Third Class. But as soon as the tyranny of Virgil and Homer and
Sophocles was overpast, he betook himself to more congenial studies.
Of the two tutors who then made Balliol famous, he owed nothing to
Jowett and everything to T. H. Green. That truly great man "simply
fell in love" with his brilliant pupil, and gave him of his best.
"Philosophy's the chap for me," said an eminent man on a momentous
occasion. "If a parent asks a question in the classical, commercial,
or mathematical-line, says I gravely, 'Why, sir, in the first place,
are you a philosopher?' 'No, Mr. Squeers,' he says, 'I ain't.'
'Then, sir,' says I, 'I am sorry for you, for I shan't be able
to explain it.' Naturally, the parent goes away and wishes he was
a philosopher, and, equally naturally, thinks I'm one."
That is the Balliol manner all over; and the ardent Holland, instructed
by Green, soon discovered, to his delight, that he was a philosopher,
and was henceforward qualified to apply Mr. Squeer's searching
test to all questions in Heaven and earth. "It was the custom at
Balliol for everyone to write an essay once a week, and I remember
that Holland made a name for his essay-writing and originality.
It was known that he had
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a good chance of a 'First in Greats,' if only his translations from
Greek and Latin books did not pull him down. He admired the ancient
authors, especially Plato, and his quick grasp of the meaning of what
he read, good memory, and very remarkable powers of expression,
all helped him much. He was good at History and he had a great turn
for Philosophy" (cf. Mr. Squeers, supra), "Plato,
Hegel; etc., and he understood, as few could, Green's expositions,
and counter-attack on John Stuart Mill and the Positivist School,
which was the dominant party at that time."
In the summer Term of 1870 Holland went in for his final examination
at Oxford. A friend writes: "I remember his coming out from his
paper on, Moral Philosophy in great exaltation; and his viva
voce was spoken of as a most brilliant performance. One of
the examiners, T. Fowler (afterwards President of Corpus), said
he had never heard anything like it." In fine, a new and vivid
light had appeared in the intellectual sky—a new planet had
swum into the ken of Oxford Common Rooms; and it followed naturally
that Holland, having obtained his brilliant First, was immediately
elected to a Studentship at Christ Church, which, of course, is
the same as a Fellowship anywhere else. He went into residence at
his new home in January, 1871, and remained there for thirteen
years, a "don," indeed, by office, but so undonnish in character,
ways, and words, that he became the subject of a eulogistic riddle:
"When is a don not a don? When he is Scott Holland."
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Meanwhile, all dreams of a diplomatic career had fled before the
onrush of Aristotle and Plato, Hegel and Green. The considerations
which determined Holland's choice of a profession I have not sought
to enquire. Probably he was moved by the thought that in Holy Orders
he would have the best chance of using the powers, of which by
this time he must have become conscious, for the glory of God and
the service of man. I have been told that the choice was in some
measure affected by a sermon of Liddon's on the unpromising subject
of Noah;[*] and beyond doubt the habitual enjoyment of Liddon's
society, to which, as a brother-Student, Holland was now admitted,
must have tended in the same direction.
Perhaps an even stronger influence was that of Edward King, afterwards
Bishop of Lincoln, and then Principal of Cuddesdon, in whom the
most persuasive aspects of the priestly character were beautifully
displayed, and who made Cuddesdon a sort of shrine to which all
that was spiritual and ardent in young Oxford was irresistibly
attracted. Preaching, years afterwards, at a Cuddesdon Festival,
Holland uttered this moving panegyric of the place to which he owed
so much: "Ah! which of us does not know by what sweet entanglement
Cuddesdon threw its net about our willing feet? Some summer Sunday,
perhaps, we wandered here, in undergraduate days, to see a friend;
and from that hour the charm was at work. How joyous, how
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enticing, the welcome, the glad brotherhood! So warm and loving
it all seemed, as we thought of the sharp skirmishing of our talk
in College; so buoyant and rich, as we recalled the thinness of
our Oxford interests. The little rooms, like college rooms just
shrinking into cells; the long talk on the summer lawn; the old
church with its quiet country look of patient peace; the glow of
the evening chapel; the run down the hill under the stars, with
the sound of Compline Psalms still ringing in our hearts—ah!
happy, happy day! It was enough. The resolve that lay half slumbering
in our souls took shape; it leapt out. We would come to Cuddesdon
when the time of preparation should draw on!" Readers of this glowing
passage have naturally imagined that the writer of it must himself
have been a Cuddesdon man, but this is a delusion; and, so far as
I know, Holland's special preparation for Ordination consisted
of a visit to Peterborough, where he essayed the desperate task
of studying theology under Dr. Westcott.
In September, 1872, he was ordained deacon by Bishop Mackarness, in
Cuddesdon Church, being chosen to read the Gospel at the Ordination;
and he was ordained priest there just two years later. It was during
his diaconate that I, then a freshman, made his acquaintance. We
often came across one another, in friends' rooms and at religious
meetings, and I used to listen with delight to the sermons which
he preached in the parish churches of Oxford. They were absolutely
original; they always exhilarated and uplifted one; and the style
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was entirely his own, full of lightness and brightness, movement
and colour. Scattered phrases from a sermon at SS. Philip and James,
on the 3rd of May, 1874, and from another at St. Barnabas, on the
28th of June in the same year, still haunt my memory.[*]
Holland lived at this time a wonderfully busy and varied life. He
lectured on Philosophy in Christ Church; he took his full share
in the business of University and College; he worked and pleaded
for all righteous causes both among the undergraduates and among
the citizens. An Oxford tutor said not long ago: "A new and strong
effort for moral purity in Oxford can be dated from Holland's
Proctorship."
This seems to be a suitable moment for mentioning his attitude
towards social and political questions. He was "suckled in a creed
outworn" of Eldonian Toryism, but soon exchanged it for Gladstonian
Liberalism, and this, again, he suffused with an energetic spirit
of State Socialism on which Mr. Gladstone would have poured his
sternest wrath. A friend writes: "I don't remember that H. S. H.,
when he was an undergraduate, took much interest in politics more
than chaffing others for being so Tory." (He never spoke at the
Union, and had probably not realized his powers as a speaker.)
"But when, in 1872, I went to be curate to Oakley (afterwards Dean
of Manchester) at St. Saviour's,
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Hoxton, Holland used to come and see me there, and I found him
greatly attracted to social life in the East End of London. In
1875 he came, with Edward Talbot and Robert Moberly, and lodged in
Hoxton, and went about among the people, and preached in the church.
I have sometimes thought that this may have been the beginning of
the Oxford House."
All through these Oxford years Holland's fame as an original and
independent thinker, a fascinating preacher, an enthusiast for
Liberalism as the natural friend and ally of Christianity, was
widening to a general recognition. And when, in April, 1884, Mr.
Gladstone nominated him to a Residentiary Canonry at St. Paul's,
everyone felt that the Prime Minister had matched a great man with
a great opportunity.
From that day to this, Henry Scott Holland has lived in the public
eye, so there is no need for a detailed narrative of his more recent
career. All London has known him as a great and inspiring preacher;
a literary critic of singular skill and grace; an accomplished
teacher in regions quite outside theology; a sympathetic counsellor
in difficulty and comforter in distress; and one of the most vivid
and joyous figures in our social life. It is possible to trace
some change in his ways of thinking, though none in his ways of
feeling and acting. His politics have swayed from side to side
under the pressure of conflicting currents. Some of his friends
rejoice—and others lament—that he is much less of a
partisan than he was; that he is apt to see two
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and even three sides of a question; and that he is sometimes kind
to frauds and humbugs, if only they will utter the shibboleths
in which he himself so passionately believes. But, through all
changes and chances, he has stood as firm as a rock for the social
doctrine of the Cross, and has made the cause of the poor, the
outcast, and the overworked his own. He has shown the glory of
the Faith in its human bearings, and has steeped Dogma and, Creed
and Sacrament and Ritual in his own passionate love of God and
man.
Stupid people misunderstand him. Wicked people instinctively hate
him. Worldly people, sordid people, self-seekers, and promotion-hunters,
contemn him as an amiable lunatic. But his friends forget all measure
and restraint when they try to say what they feel about him. One
whom I have already quoted writes again: "I feel Holland is little
changed from what he was as a schoolboy and an undergraduate—the
same joyous spirit, unbroken good temper, quick perception and
insight, warm sympathy, love of friends, kind interest in lives
of all sorts, delight in young people—these never fail. He
never seems to let the burden of life and the sadness of things
depress his cheery, hopeful spirit. I hope that what I send may be
of some use. I cannot express what I feel. I love him too well."
This is the tribute of one friend; let me add my own. I do not
presume to say what I think about him as a spiritual guide and
example; I confine myself to humbler topics. Whatever else he is,
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Henry Scott Holland is, beyond doubt, one of the most delightful
people in the world. In fun and geniality and warm-hearted, hospitality,
he is a worthy successor of Sydney Smith, whose official house he
inhabits; and to those elements of agreeableness he adds certain
others which his famous predecessor could scarcely have claimed.
He has all the sensitiveness of genius, with its sympathy, its
versatility, its unexpected turns, its rapid transitions from grave
to gay, its vivid appreciation of all that is beautiful in art and
nature, literature and life. No man in London, I should think,
has so many and such devoted friends in every class and station;
and those friends acknowledge in him not only the most vivacious
and exhilarating of social companions, but one of the moral forces
which have done most to quicken their consciences and lift their
lives.
By the death of Henry Scott Holland a great light is quenched,[*]
or, to use more Christian language, is merged in "the true Light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
Light is the idea with which my beloved friend is inseparably associated
in my mind. His nature had all the attributes of light—its
revealing power, its cheerfulness, its salubrity, its beauty, its
inconceivable rapidity. He had the quickest intellect that I have
ever known. He saw with a flash into the heart of an argument or
a situation. He
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diffused joy by his own joy in living; he vanquished morbidity by
his essential wholesomeness; whatever he touched became beautiful
under his handling. "He was not the Light, but he came to bear
witness of that Light," and bore it for seventy years by the mere
force of being what he was. My friendship with Dr. Holland began
in my second term at Oxford, and has lasted without a cloud or a
break from that day to this. He was then twenty-five years old,
and was already a conspicuous figure in the life of the University.
In 1866 he had come up from Eton to Balliol with a high reputation
for goodness and charm, but with no report of special cleverness.
He soon became extremely popular in his own College and outside
it. He rowed and played games and sang, and was recognized as a
delightful companion wherever he went. But all the time a process
of mental development was going on, of which none but his intimate
friends were aware. "I owed nothing to Jowett," he was accustomed
to say; "everything to Green." From that great teacher he caught
his Hegelian habit of thought, his strong sense of ethical and
spiritual values, and that practical habit of mind which seeks
to apply moral principles to the problems of actual life. In 1870
came the great surprise, and Holland, who had no pretensions to
scholarship, and whose mental development had only been noticed
by a few, got a First Class of unusual brilliancy in the searching
school of Literœ Humaniores. Green had triumphed; he
had made a philosopher without spoiling a Christian. Christ Church
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welcomed a born Platonist, and made him Senior Student, Tutor, and
Lecturer.
Holland had what Tertullian calls the anima naturaliter
Christiana, and it had been trained on the lines of the Tractarian
Movement. When he went up to Oxford he destined himself for a diplomatic
career, but he now realized his vocation to the priesthood, and was
ordained deacon in 1872 and priest two years later. He instantly made
his mark as a preacher. Some of the sermons preached in the parish
churches of Oxford in the earliest years of his ministry stand out in
my memory among his very best. He had all the preacher's gifts—a
tall, active, and slender frame, graceful in movement, vigorous in
action, abundant in gesture, a strong and melodious voice, and a
breathless fluency of speech. Above all, he spoke with an energy
of passionate conviction which drove every word straight home. He
seemed a young apostle on fire with zeal for God and humanity. His
fame as an exponent of metaphysic attracted many hearers who did
not usually go much to church, and they were accustomed—then
as later—to say that here was a Christian who knew enough
about the problems of thought to make his testimony worth hearing.
Others, who cared not a rap for Personality or Causation, Realism
or Nominalism, were attracted by his grace, his eloquence, his
literary charm. His style was entirely his own. He played strange
tricks with the English language, heaped words upon words, strung
adjective to adjective; mingled passages of Ruskinesque description
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with jerky fragments of modern slang. These mannerisms grew with
his growth, but in the seventies they were not sufficiently marked
to detract from the pure pleasure which we enjoyed when we listened
to his preaching as to "a very lovely song."
Judged by the canons of strict art, Holland was perhaps greater
as a speaker than as a preacher. He differed from most people in
this—that whereas most of us can restrain ourselves better
on paper than when we are speaking, his pen ran away with him when
he, was writing a sermon, but on a platform he could keep his natural
fluency in bounds. Even then he was fluent enough in all conscience;
but he did not so overdo the ornaments, and the absence of a manuscript
and a pulpit-desk gave ampler scope for oratorical movement.
I have mentioned Holland's intellectual and moral debt to T. H.
Green. I fancy that, theologically and politically, he owed as
much to Mr. Gladstone. The older and the younger man had a great
deal in common. They both were "patriot citizens of the kingdom of
God"; proud and thankful to be members of the Holy Church Universal,
and absolutely satisfied with that portion of the Church in which
their lot was cast; passionate adherents of the Sacramental theology;
and yet, in their innermost devotion to the doctrine of the Cross,
essentially Evangelical. In politics they both worshipped freedom;
they both were content to appeal to the popular judgment; and they
both were heart and soul for the Christian cause in the East of
Europe. Holland had been brought up by
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Tories, but in all the great controversies of 1886 to 1894 he followed
the Gladstonian flag with the loyalty of a good soldier and the
faith of a loving son.
When in 1884 Gladstone appointed Holland to a Canonry at St. Paul's,
the announcement was received with an amount of interest which is
not often bestowed upon ecclesiastical promotions. Everyone felt
that it was a daring experiment to place this exuberant prophet
of the good time coming at what Bishop Lightfoot called "the centre
of the world's concourse." Would his preaching attract or repel?
Would the "philosophy of religion," which is the perennial interest
of Oxford, appeal to the fashionable or business-like crowd which
sits under the Dome? Would his personal influence reach beyond the
precincts of the Cathedral into the civil and social and domestic
life of London? Would the Mauritian gospel of human brotherhood
and social service—in short, the programme of the Christian
Social Union—win the workers to the side of orthodoxy? These
questions were answered according to the idiosyncrasy or bias of
those to whom they were addressed, and they were not settled when,
twenty-seven years later, Holland returned from St. Paul's to Oxford.
Indeed, several answers were possible. On one point only there was
an absolute agreement among those who knew, and this was that the
Church in London had been incalculably enriched by the presence
of a genius and a saint.
In one respect, perhaps, Holland's saintliness
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interfered with the free action of his genius. His insight, unerring
in a moral or intellectual problem, seemed to fail him when he
came to estimate a human character. His own life had always been
lived on the highest plane, and he was in an extraordinary degree
"unspotted from the world." His tendency was to think—or
at any rate to speak and act—as if everyone were as simply
good as himself, as transparent, as conscientious, as free from
all taint of self-seeking. This habit, it has been truly said,
"disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which
requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice"; but it
is pre-eminently characteristic of those elect and lovely souls
"Who, through the world's long day of strife,
Still chant their morning song."
LORD HALIFAX
There can scarcely be two more typically English names than Wood
and Grey. In Yorkshire and Northumberland respectively, they have
for centuries been held in honour, and it was a happy conjunction
which united them in 1829. In that year, Charles Wood, elder son of
Sir Francis Lindley Wood, married Lady Mary Grey, youngest daughter
of Charles, second Earl Grey, the hero of the first Reform Bill.
Mr. Wood succeeded his father in the baronetcy, in 1846, sat in
Parliament as a Liberal for forty years, filled some of the highest
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offices of State in the Administrations of Lord Palmerston and Mr.
Gladstone, and was raised to the peerage as Viscount Halifax in 1866.
Lord and Lady Halifax had seven children, of whom the eldest was
Charles Lindley Wood—the subject of the present sketch—born
in 1839; and the second, Emily Charlotte, wife of Hugo Meynell-Ingram,
of Hoar Cross and Temple Newsam. I mention these two names together
because Mrs. Meynell-Ingram (whose qualities of intellect and character
made a deep impression on all those who were brought in contact with
her) was one of the formative influences of her brother's life.
The present Lord Halifax (who succeeded to his father's peerage
in 1885) writes thus about his early days:
"My sister was everything to me. I never can remember the time
when it was not so between us. I hardly ever missed writing to
her every day when we were away from one another; and for many
years after her marriage, and as long as her eyes were good, I
don't think she and I ever omitted writing to one another, as,
indeed, we had done all through my school and college life. She
is never out of my mind and thoughts. Her birthday, on the 19th
of July, and mine, on the 7th of June, were days which stood out
amongst all the days of the year."
This extract illustrates the beautiful atmosphere of mutual love
and trust in which the family of Sir Charles and Lady Mary Wood
were reared. In other respects their upbringing was what one would
naturally expect in a Yorkshire country-house, where politics were
judiciously blended with fox-hunting. From the enjoyments of a bright
home, and the benign sway of the governess, and the companionship
of a favourite sister, the transition
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to a private school is always depressing. In April, 1849, Charles
Wood was sent to the Rev. Charles Arnold's, at Tinwell, near Stamford.
"What I chiefly remember about the place is being punished all one
day, with several canings, because I either could not or would
not learn the Fifth Declension of the Greek Nouns."
So much for the curriculum of Tinwell; but it only lasted for one
year, and then, after two years with a private tutor at home, Charles
Wood went to Eton in January, 1853. He boarded at the house of the
Rev. Francis Vidal, and his tutor was the famous William Johnson,
afterwards Cory. "Billy Johnson" was not only a consummate scholar
and a most stimulating teacher, but the sympathetic and discerning
friend of the boys who were fortunate enough to be his private
pupils. In his book of verses—Ionica—he made
graceful play with a casual word which Charles Wood had let fall
in the ecstasy of swimming—"Oh, how I wish I could fly!"
"Fresh from the summer wave, under the beech,
Looking through leaves with a far-darting eye,
Tossing those river-pearled locks about,
Throwing those delicate limbs straight out,
Chiding the clouds as they sailed out of reach,
Murmured the swimmer, 'I wish I could fly!'
"Laugh, if you like, at the bold reply,
Answer disdainfully, flouting my words:
How should the listener at simple sixteen
Guess what a foolish old rhymer could mean,
Calmly predicting, 'You will surely fly'—
Fish one might vie with, but how be like birds?
Page 108
"Genius and love will uplift thee; not yet;
Walk through some passionless years by my side,
Chasing the silly sheep, snapping the lily-stalk,
Drawing my secrets forth, witching my soul with talk.
When the sap stays, and the blossom is set,
Others will take the fruit; I shall have died."
Surely no teacher ever uttered a more beautiful eulogy on a favourite
pupil; and happily the poet lived long enough to see his prophecy
fulfilled.
The principal charm of a Public School lies in its friendships;
so here let me record the names of those who are recalled by
contemporaries as having been Charles Wood's closest friends, at
Eton—Edward Denison, Sackville Stopford, George Palmer, George
Lane-Fox, Walter Campion, Lyulph Stanley,[1] and Augustus Legge.[2]
With Palmer, now Sir George, he "messed," and with Stopford, now
Stopford-Sackville, he shared a private boat. As regards his pursuits
I may quote his own words:
"I steered the Britannia and the Victory. I used to
take long walks with friends in Windsor Park, and used sometimes to
go up to the Castle, to ride with the present King.[3] I remember,
in two little plays which William Johnson wrote for his pupils,
taking the part of an Abbess in a Spanish Convent at the time of
the Peninsular War; and the part of the Confidante of the Queen
of Cyprus, in an historical in which Sir Archdale Palmer was the
hero, and a boy named Chafyn Grove, who went into the Guards, the
heroine. In Upper School, at Speeches on the 4th of June, I acted
with Lyulph Stanley in a French piece called Femme à
Vendre. In 1857, I and George Cadogan,[4] and Willy Gladstone,
Page 109
and Freddy Stanley[5] went with the present King for a tour in the
English Lakes; and in the following August we went with the King to
Koenigs-winter. I was in 'Pop' (the Eton Debating Society) at the
end of my time at Eton, and I won the 'Albert,' the Prince Consort's
Prize for French."
A younger contemporary adds this pretty testimony:
"As you can imagine, he was very popular both among the boys and
the masters. One little instance remains with me. There was a custom
of a boy, when leaving, receiving what one called 'Leaving Books,'
from boys remaining in the school; these books were provided by
the parents, and were bound in calf, etc. The present Lord Eldon
went to Eton with me, and when Charles Wood left, in July, 1858,
he wanted to give him a book; but knowing nothing of the custom
of parents providing books, he went out and bought a half-crown
copy of The Pilgrim's Progress, and sent it to C. Wood's
room. Two shillings and sixpence was a good deal to a Lower Boy at
the end of the half; and it was, I should think, an almost unique
testimony from a small boy to one at the top of the house."
In October, 1858, Charles Wood went up to Christ Church. There
many of his earlier friendships were renewed and some fresh ones
added: Mr. Henry Chaplin coming up from Harrow; Mr. H. L. Thompson,
afterwards Vicar of St. Mary-the-Virgin, Oxford, from Westminster;
and Mr. Henry Villiers, afterwards Vicar of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge,
from a private tutor's. Charles Wood took his full share in the
social life of the place, belonging both to "Loder's" and to
"Bullingdon"—institutions of high repute in the Oxford world;
and being then, as now, an admirable horseman, he found his chief
Page 110
joy in hunting. In his vacations he visited France and Italy, and
made some tours nearer home with undergraduate friends. In 1861
he took his degree, and subsequently travelled Eastward as far as
Suez, and spent a winter in Rome. In 1862 he was appointed Groom of
the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, and in this capacity attended
his royal master's wedding at St. George's, Windsor, on the 10th
of March, 1863, and spent two summers with him at Abergeldie. At
the same time he became Private Secretary to his mother's cousin,
Sir George Grey, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, and
retained that post until the fall of Lord Russell's Administration
in 1866.
"There was," writes Lord Halifax, "a question of my standing for
some Yorkshire constituency; but with my convictions it was not
easy to come out on the Liberal side, and the project dropped.
I never can remember the time when I did not feel the greatest
devotion to King Charles I. and Archbishop Laud. I can recall now
the services for the Restoration at Eton, when everyone used to
wear an oak-leaf in his button-hole, and throw it down on the floor
as the clock struck twelve."
This may be a suitable moment for a word about Lord Halifax's
"convictions" in the sphere of religion. His parents were, like
all the Whigs, sound and sturdy Protestants. They used to take
their children to Church at Whitehall Chapel, probably the least
ecclesiastical-looking place of worship in London; and the observances
of the Parish Church at Hickleton—their country home near
Doncaster—were not calculated to inspire a delight in the
beauty of holiness. However, when quite
Page 111
a boy, Charles Wood, who had been confirmed at Eton by Bishop
Wilberforce, found his way to St. Barnabas, Pimlico, then newly
opened, and fell much under the influence of Mr. Bennett at St.
Paul's, Knightsbridge, and Mr. Richards, at All Saints', Margaret
Street. At Oxford he became acquainted with Dr. Pusey and the young
and inspiring Liddon, and frequented the services at Merton College
Chapel, where Liddon used often to officiate. By 1863 his religious
opinions must have been definitely shaped; for in that year his old
tutor, William Johnson, when paying a visit to Hickleton, writes
as follows:
"He told me of Mr. Liddon, the saintly and learned preacher; of
the devout worshippers at All Saints', whose black nails show they
are artisans; of the society formed to pray daily for the restoration
of Christian unity."
And again:
"His father and mother seem to gather virtue and sweetness from
looking at him and talking to him, though they fight hard against
his unpractical and exploded Church views, and think his zeal
misdirected.... And all the while his mother's face gets brighter
and kinder because she is looking at him. Happy are the parents
who, when they have reached that time of life in which the world is
getting too strong and virtue is a thing of routine, are quickened
by the bold, restless zeal of their sons and daughters, and so
renew their youth."
In 1866 he was induced by his friend Mr. Lane-Fox, afterwards Chancellor
of the Primrose League, to join the English Church Union.
"At that time," he writes, "I was much concerned with the affairs
of the House of Charity in Soho and the Newport Market Refuge.
1866 was the cholera year, and I recollect
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coming straight back from Lorne's[*] coming of age to London, where
I saw Dr. Pusey, with the result that I set to work to help Miss
Sellon with her temporary hospital in Commercial Street, Whitechapel."
In this connexion it is proper to recall the devoted services which
he rendered to the House of Mercy at Horbury, near Wakefield; and
those who know what religious prejudice was in rural districts
forty years ago will realize the value of the support accorded to
an institution struggling against calumny and misrepresentation
by the most popular and promising young man in the West Riding.
There lies before me as I write a letter written by an Evangelical
mother—Lady Charles Russell—to her son, then just ordained
to a curacy at Doncaster.
"I want to hear more about Lord and Lady Halifax. I knew them pretty
well as Sir Charles and Lady Mary Wood, but I have lived in retirement
since before he was raised to the peerage. His eldest son was not
only very good-looking, but inclined to be very good, as I dare
say Dr. Vaughan may have heard. Do you know anything about him?"
That "very good" and "very good-looking" young man was now approaching
what may be called the decisive event of his life. In April, 1867,
Mr. Colin Lindsay resigned the Presidency of the English Church
Union, and Mr. Charles Lindley Wood was unanimously chosen to fill
his place. Eleven years later Dr. Pusey wrote: "As to his being
President of the E.C.U., he is the sense and moderation of it." He
has administered its affairs and guided its policy through fifty
Page 113
anxious years. Indeed, the President and the Union have been so
completely identified that the history of the one has been the history
of the other. His action has been governed by a grand and simple
consistency. Alike in storms and in fair weather, at times of crisis
and at times of reaction, he has been the unswerving and unsleeping
champion of the spiritual claims of the English Church, and the alert,
resourceful, and unsparing enemy of all attempts, from whatever
quarter, to subject her doctrine and discipline to the control of
the State and its secular tribunals. The eager and fiery enthusiasm
which pre-eminently marks his nature awakes a kindred flame in
those who are reached by his influence; and, even when the reason
is unconvinced, it is difficult to resist the leadership of so
pure and passionate a temper.
It would be ridiculous for an outsider, like myself, to discuss the
interior working of the E.C.U., so I avail myself of the testimony
which has reached me from within.
"Like most men of his temperament, Lord Halifax seems now and again
to be a little before his time. On the other hand, it is remarkable
that Time generally justifies him. There is no question that he
has always enjoyed the enthusiastic and affectionate support of
the Union as a whole."
It is true that once with reference to the book called Lux Mundi,
and once with reference to the "Lambeth Opinions" of 1899, there
was some resistance in the Union to Lord Halifax's guidance; and
that, in his negotiations about the recognition of Anglican Orders,
he would not, if he had been acting
Page 114
officially, have carried the Union with him. But these exceptions
only go to confirm the general truth that his policy has been as
successful as it has been bold and conscientious.
It is time to return, for a moment, to the story of Lord Halifax's
private life. In 1869 he married Lady Agnes Courtenay, daughter
of the twelfth Earl of Devon, and in so doing allied himself with
one of the few English families which even the most exacting
genealogists recognize as noble.[1] His old tutor wrote on the 22nd
of April:
"This has been a remarkable day—the wedding of Charles Wood
and Lady Agnes Courtenay. It was in St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge,
which was full, galleries and all, the central passage left empty,
and carpeted with red. It was a solemn, rapt congregation; there
was a flood of music and solemn tender voices. The married man
and woman took the Lord's Supper, with hundreds of witnesses who
did not Communicate.... Perhaps a good many were Church Union folk,
honouring their Chairman."
Of this marriage I can only say that it has been, in the highest
aspects, ideally happy, and that the sorrows which have chequered
it have added a new significance to the saying of Ecclesiastes
that "A threefold cord is not quickly broken."[2]
In 1877 Mr. Wood resigned his office in the household of the Prince
of Wales. It was the time when the affairs of St. James's, Hatcham,
and the persecution
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of Mr. Tooth, were first bringing the Church into sharp collision
with the courts of law. The President of the Church Union was the
last man to hold his peace when even the stones were crying out
against this profane intrusion of the State into the kingdom of
God; and up and down the country he preached, in season and out of
season, the spiritual independence of the Church, and the criminal
folly of trying to coerce Christian consciences by deprivation and
imprisonment. The story went that an Illustrious Personage said
to his insurgent Groom of the Bedchamber: "What's this I hear?
I'm told you go about the country saying that the Queen is not
the Head of the Church. Of course, she's the Head of the Church,
just the same as the Pope is the Head of his Church, and the Sultan
the Head of his Church.'" But this may only be a creation
of that irresponsible romancist, Ben Trovato; and it is better
to take Lord Halifax's account of the transaction:
"I remember certain remonstrances being made to me in regard to
disobedience to the law and suchlike, and my saying at once that I
thought it quite unreasonable that the Prince should be compromised
by anyone in his household taking a line of which he himself did
not approve; and that I honestly thought I had much better resign
my place. Nothing could have been nicer or kinder than the Prince
was about it; and, if I resigned, I thought it much better for him
on the one side, while, as regards myself, as you may suppose,
I was not going to sacrifice my own liberty of saying and doing
what I thought right."
In those emphatic words speaks the true spirit of the man. To "say
and do what he thinks right,"
Page 116
without hesitation or compromise or regard to consequences, has
been alike the principle and the practice of his life. And here the
reader has a right to ask, What manner of man is he whose career
you have been trying to record?
First and foremost, it must be said—truth demands it, and no
conventional reticence must withhold it—that the predominant
feature of his character is his religiousness. He belongs to a higher
world than this. His "citizenship is in Heaven." Never can I forget
an address which, twenty years ago, he delivered, by request, in
Stepney Meeting-House. His subject was "Other-worldliness." The
audience consisted almost exclusively of Nonconformists. Many, I
imagine, had come with itching ears, or moved by a natural curiosity
to see the man whose bold discrimination between the things of
Cæsar and the things of God was just then attracting, general
attention, and, in some quarters, wrathful dismay. But gradually,
as the high theme unfolded itself, and the lecturer showed the
utter futility of all that this world has to offer when compared
with the realities of the Supernatural Kingdom, curiosity was awed
into reverence, and the address closed amid a silence more eloquent
than any applause."
"That strain I heard was of a higher mood."
As I listened, I recalled some words written by Dr. Pusey in 1879,
about
"One whom I have known intimately for many years, who is one of
singular moderation as well as wisdom, who can
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discriminate with singular sagacity what is essential from is not
essential—C. Wood."
The Doctor went on:
"I do not think that I was ever more impressed than by a public
address which I heard him deliver now many years ago, in which,
without controversy or saying anything which could have offended
anyone, he expressed his own faith on deep subjects with a precision
which reminded me of Hooker's wonderful enunciation of the doctrine
of the Holy Trinity and of the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ."
After so solemn a tribute from so great a saint, it seems almost
a profanity—certainly a bathos—to add any more secular
touches. Yet, if the portrait is even to approach completeness, it
must be remembered that we are not describing an ascetic or a recluse,
but the most polished gentleman, the most fascinating companion,
the most graceful and attractive figure, in the Vanity Fair of
social life. He is full of ardour, zeal, and emotion, endowed with
a physical activity which corresponds to his mental alertness, and
young with that perpetual youth which is the reward of "a conscience
void of offence toward God and toward man."
Clarendon, in one of his most famous portraits, depicts a high-souled
Cavalier, "of inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation,
of a glowing and obliging humanity and goodness to mankind, and
of a primitive simplicity and integrity of life." He was writing
of Lord Falkland: he described Lord Halifax.
LORD AND LADY RIPON[*]
The Character of the Happy Warrior is, by common consent,
one of the noblest poems in the English language. A good many writers
and speakers seem to have discovered it only since the present war
began, and have quoted it with all the exuberant zeal of a new
acquaintance. But, were a profound Wordsworthian in general, and
a devotee of this poem in particular, to venture on a criticism,
it would be that, barring the couplet about Pain and Bloodshed,
the character would serve as well for the "Happy Statesman" as
for the "Happy Warrior." There is nothing specially warlike in the
portraiture of the man
"Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
Prosperous or adverse, to his mind or not,
Plays in the many games of life, that one
Where what he most doth value must be won;
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Not thought of tender happiness betray;
Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpast."
These lines always recurred to my memory when circumstances brought
me into contact with the second Lord Ripon, whose friendship I
enjoyed from my first entrance into public life.
Page 119
I know few careers in the political life of modern England more
interesting or more admirable than his, and none more exactly consonant
with Wordsworth's eulogy:
"Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpast."
The first Lord Ripon, who was born in 1782 and died in 1859, entered
public life as soon as he had done with Cambridge, filled pretty
nearly every office of honour and profit under the Crown (including,
for four troubled months, the Premiership), and served impartially
under moderate Whigs and crusted Tories, finding, perhaps, no very
material difference between their respective creeds. The experiences
of the hen that hatches the duckling are proverbially pathetic; and
great must have been the perplexity of this indeterminate statesman
when he discovered that his only son was a young man of the most robust
convictions, and that those convictions were frankly democratic. To
men possessed by birth of rank and wealth, one has sometimes heard
the question addressed, in the sheer simplicity of snobbery, "Why
are you a Liberal?" and to such a question Lord Goderich (for so
the second Lord Ripon was called till he succeeded to his father's
title) would probably have replied, "Because I can't help it." He
was an only child, educated at home, and therefore free to form
his own opinions at an age when most boys are subject to the
stereotyping forces of a Public School and a University. Almost
before his arrival
Page 120
at man's estate, he had clearly marked out his line of political
action, and to that line he adhered with undeviating consistency.
He was supremely fortunate in an early and ideally happy marriage.
Tennyson might well have drawn the heroine of The Talking Oak
from Henrietta, Lady Ripon:
"Yet, since I first could cast a shade,
Did never creature pass,
So slightly, musically made,
So light upon the grass."
Her mental constitution corresponded to her physical frame; she was
the brightest of companions and the most sympathetic of friends.
She shared to the full her husband's zeal for the popular cause,
and stimulated his efforts for social as well as political reform.
From the earliest days of their married life, Lord and Lady Goderich
made their home a centre and a rallying-point for all the scattered
forces which, within the Liberal party or beyond its pale, were
labouring to promote the betterment of human life. There the "Christian
Socialists," recovering from the shocks and disasters of '48,
re-gathered their shattered hosts, and reminded a mocking world
that the People's Cause was not yet lost. There was Maurice with
his mystical eloquence, and Kingsley with his fiery zeal, and Hughes
and Vansittart and Ludlow with their economic knowledge and powerful
pens. They were reinforced by William Edward Forster, a young Radical
M.P., whose zeal for social service had already marked him out
from the ruck
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of mechanical politicians; and from time to time Carlyle himself would
vouchsafe a growl of leonine approval to enterprises which, whether
wise or foolish, were at least not shams. In 1852 the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers conducted in London and Lancashire a strike
which had begun in some engineering works at Oldham. The Christian
Socialists gave it their support, and Lord Goderich subscribed
£500 to the maintenance of the strikers. But, although he
lived in this highly idealistic society, surrounded by young men
who saw visions and old men who dreamed dreams, Lord Goderich was
neither visionary nor dreamer. He passed, under Lord Russell, Lord
Palmerston, and Mr. Gladstone, through a long series of practical
and laborious offices. He became Secretary of State for India,
and for War; and, when Lord President of the Council, attained
perhaps the highest honour of his life in being appointed Chairman
of the Joint Commission on American Affairs, which in 1871 saved
us from the unimaginable calamity of war with the United States.
Ten years later, as Viceroy of India, he made his permanent mark
on the history of the British Empire; and from that day forward no
Liberal Government would have been considered complete unless it
could show the sanction of his honoured name. When, in February,
1886, Gladstone formed the Administration which was to establish
Home Rule, Lord Ripon, who became First Lord of the Admiralty,
explained his position to me with happy candour: "I have always
been in favour of the most advanced thing in the Liberal
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Programme. Just now the most advanced thing is Home Rule; so I'm
a Home Ruler."
In the last year of Lord Ripon's life, when he had just retired
from the Cabinet and the leadership of the House of Lords, he was
entertained at luncheon by the Eighty Club, and the occasion was
marked by some more than usually interesting speeches. It always
is satisfactory to see public honours rendered, not to a monument
or a tomb, but to the living man; and, in Lord Ripon's case, the
honours, though ripe, were not belated. George Eliot has reminded
us that "to all ripeness under the sun there comes a further stage
of development which is less esteemed in the market." The Eighty
Club avoided that latent peril, and paid its honours, while they
were still fresh and worth having, to the living representative of a
Liberalism "more high and heroical than the present age affecteth."
One could not help feeling that the audience which Lord Ripon faced
when he was addressing the Club was Radical to the backbone. Radicals
themselves, and eager to set the world right, they paid reverence to
a Radical who, sixty years ago, was inspired by the same passion,
and in all that long stretch of time has never failed the cause.
The applause, hearty, genuine, emotional, was even more expressive
than the oratory, for it was evoked by the presence of a man who,
in his earliest youth, had burst the trammels of station and
environment, and had sworn himself to the service of the poor,
the ill-fed, and the unrepresented, in days when such devotion was
far more difficult than now. It is probable that
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not a few of Lord Ripon's hearers, while they acclaimed his words
and waved their salutations, may have added in the depths of their
hearts some aspiration such as this: "When I come to my eightieth
year, may I be able to look back upon a career as consistent, as
unselfish, and as beneficent."
Thrice happy is the man, be he Warrior or Statesman, who, in spite
of lessened activity and increasing burdens and the loss of much
that once made life enjoyable, still
"Finds comfort in himself and in his cause,
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause."
"FREDDY LEVESON"
When a man has died in his eighty-ninth year, it seems irreverent
to call him by his nickname. And yet the irreverence is rather in
seeming than in reality, for a nickname, a pet-name, an abbreviation,
is often the truest token of popular esteem. It was so with the
subject of this section, whose perennial youthfulness of heart
and mind would have made formal appellation seem stiff and out of
place.
Edward Frederick Leveson-Gower was the third son of Granville
Leveson-Gower, first Earl Granville, by his marriage with Henrietta
Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the third Duke of Devonshire.
The very names breathe Whiggery, and in their combination they
suggest a considerable and an important portion of our social and
political history.
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I have always maintained that Whiggery, rightly understood, is not
a political creed, but a social caste. The Whig, like the poet, is
born, not made. It is as difficult to become a Whig as to become a
Jew. Macaulay was probably the only man who, being born outside the
privileged enclosure, ever penetrated to its heart and assimilated
its spirit. It is true that the Whigs, as a body, have held certain
opinions and pursued certain tactics, which were analysed in chapters
xix. and xxi. of the unexpurgated Book of Snobs. But those
opinions and those tactics have been accidents of Whiggery. Its
substance has been relationship. When Lord John Russell formed
his first Administration, his opponents alleged that it was mainly
composed of his cousins, and the lively oracles of Sir Bernard
Burke confirmed the allegation. A. J. Beresford-Hope, in one of
his novels, made excellent fun of what he called the "Sacred Circle
of the Great-Grandmotherhood." He showed—what, indeed, the
Whigs themselves knew uncommonly well—that from John, Earl
Gower, who died in 1754, descend all the Gowers, Levesons, Howards,
Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Harcourts, and Russells, who walk on the
face of the earth. Truly a noble and a highly favoured progeny.
"They are our superiors," said Thackeray; "and that's the
fact. I am not a Whig myself (perhaps it is as unnecessary to say
so as to say that I'm not King Pippin in a golden coach, or King
Hudson, or Miss Burdett-Coutts)—I'm not a Whig; but oh, how
I should like to be one!"
It argues no political bias to maintain that, in
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the earlier part of the nineteenth century, Toryism offered to its
neophytes no educational opportunities equal to those which a young
Whig enjoyed at Chatsworth and Bowood and Woburn and Holland House.
Here the best traditions of the previous century were constantly
reinforced by accessions of fresh intellect. The circle was, indeed,
an aristocratic Family Party, but it paid a genuine homage to ability
and culture. Genius held the key, and there was a carrière
ouverte aux talents.
Into this privileged society Frederick Leveson-Gower was born on
the 3rd of May, 1819, and within its precincts he "kept the noiseless
tenour of his way" for nearly ninety years. Recalling in 1905 the
experiences of his boyhood, and among them a sharp illness at Eton,
he was able to add, "Never during my long life have I again been
seriously ill." To that extraordinary immunity from physical suffering
was probably due the imperturbable serenity which all men recognized
as his most characteristic trait, and which remained unruffled to
the end.
It is recorded of the fastidious Lady Montfort in Endymion
that, visiting Paris in 1841, she could only with difficulty be
induced to call on the British Ambassador and Ambassadress. "I
dined," she said, "with those people once; but I confess that, when
I thought of those dear Granvilles, their entrées
stuck in my throat." The "dear Granvilles" in question were the
parents of the second Lord Granville, whom we all remember as the
most urbane of Foreign Secretaries, and of Frederick
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Leveson-Gower. The first Lord Granville was a younger son of the
first Marquess of Stafford and brother of the second Marquess, who
was made Duke of Sutherland. He was born in 1773, entered Parliament
at twenty-two, and "found himself a diplomatist as well as a politician
before he was thirty years of age." In 1804 he was appointed Ambassador
to St. Petersburg, where he remained till 1807. In 1813 he was
created Viscount Granville, and in 1824 became Ambassador to the
Court of France. "To the indignation of the Legitimist party in
France, he made a special journey from Paris to London in order
to vote for the Reform Bill of 1832, and, to their astonishment,
returned alive to glory in having done so." For this and similar
acts of virtue he was raised to an earldom in 1833; he retired
from diplomacy in 1841, and died in 1846.
Before he became an Ambassador, this Lord Granville had rented
a place called Wherstead, in Suffolk. It was there that Freddy
Leveson passed the first years of his life, but from 1824 onwards
the British Embassy at Paris was his home. Both those places had
made permanent dints in his memory. At Wherstead he remembered
the Duke of Wellington shooting Lord Granville in the face and
imperilling his eyesight; at Paris he was presented to Sir Walter
Scott, who had come to dine with the Ambassador. When living at
the Embassy, Freddy Leveson was a playmate of the Duc de Bordeaux,
afterwards Comte de Chambord; and at the age of eight he was sent
from Paris to a
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Dr. Everard's school at Brighton, "which was called the House of
Lords, owing to most of the boys being related to the peerage,
many of them future peers, and among them several dukes." Here,
again, the youthful Whig found himself a playmate of Princes. Prince
George of Hanover and Prince George of Cambridge were staying with
King William IV. at the Pavilion; their companions were chosen from
Dr. Everard's seminary; and the King amused his nephews and their
friends with sailor's stories, "sometimes rather coarse ones." In
his holidays little Freddy enjoyed more refined society at Holland
House. In 1828 his mother wrote with just elation: "He always sits
next to Lord Holland, and they talk without ceasing all dinner-time."
From Brighton, Frederick Leveson was promoted in due course to
Eton, where he played no games and made no friends, had poor health,
and was generally unhappy. One trait of Eton life, and only one,
he was accustomed in old age to recall with approbation, and that
was the complete indifference to social distinctions.
"There is," he wrote, "a well-known story about my friend, the
late Lord Bath, who, on his first arrival at Eton was asked his
name, and answered, 'I am Viscount Weymouth, and I shall be Marquis
of Bath.' Upon which he-received two kicks, one for the Viscount
and the other for the Marquis. This story may not be true, but at
any rate it illustrates the fact that if at Eton a boy boasted
of his social advantages, he would have cause to repent it!"
Leaving Eton at sixteen, Frederick Leveson went to a private tutor
in Nottinghamshire, and there he
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first developed his interest in politics. "Reform," he wrote, "is
my principal aim." Albany Fonblanque, whose vivacious articles,
reprinted from the Examiner, may still be read in England
under Seven Administrations, was his political instructor, and
indoctrinated him with certain views, especially in the domain
of Political Economy, which would have been deemed heretical in
the Whiggish atmosphere of Trentham or Chatsworth. In 1832 he made
his appearance in society at Paris, and his mother wrote: "As to
Freddy, he turns all heads, and his own would be if it was to last
more than a week longer. His dancing fait fureur."
In October, 1837, he went up to Christ Church, then rather languishing
under Dean Gaisford's mismanagement. Here for three years he enjoyed
himself thoroughly. He rode with the drag, was President of the
Archery Club, played whist, gave and received a great deal of
hospitality, and made some lifelong friendships. Among his
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contemporaries was Ruskin, of whom his recollection was certainly
depressing. "He seemed to keep himself aloof from everybody, to seek
no friends, and to have none. I never met him in anyone else's rooms,
or at any social gathering. I see him now, looking rather crazy, taking
his solitary walks."
That Freddy Leveson was "thoroughly idle" was his own confession;
and perhaps, when we consider all the circumstances, it is not
surprising. What is surprising, and what he himself recorded with
surprise, is that neither he nor his contemporaries paid the least
attention to the Oxford Movement, then just at its height,
although—and this makes it stranger still—they used
to attend Newman's Sermons at St. Mary's. They duly admired his
unequalled style, but the substance of his teaching seems to have
passed by them like the idle wind.
After taking a "Nobleman's Degree," Frederick Leveson spent an
instructive year in France, admitted, by virtue of his father's
position, to the society of such men as Talleyrand and Thiers,
Guizot and Mole, Berryer and Eugene Sue; and then he returned to
England with the laudable, though uninspiring, intention of reading
for the Bar. His profession was chosen for him by his father, and
the choice was determined by a civil speech of George Canning, who,
staying at the British Embassy at Paris, noticed little Freddy,
and pleasantly said to Lord Granville, "Bring that boy up as a
lawyer, and he will one day become Lord Chancellor." As a first
step towards that elevation, Frederick Leveson entered the chambers
of an eminent conveyancer called Plunkett, where he had for his
fellow-pupils the men who became Lord Iddesleigh and Lord Farrer.
Thence he went to a Special Pleader, and lastly to a leading member
of the Oxford Circuit. As Marshal to Lord Denman and to Baron Parke,
he acquired some knowledge of the art of carving; but with regard
to the total result of his legal training, he remarked, with
characteristic simplicity, "I cannot say I learnt much law." When
living in lodgings in Charles Street, and eating his dinners at
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Lincoln's Inn, Frederick Leveson experienced to the full the advantage
of having been born a Whig. His uncle, the sixth Duke of Devonshire,
a benevolent magnifico, if ever there was one, treated him like a son,
giving him the run of Devonshire House and Chiswick; while Lady
Holland, the most imperious of social dames, let him make a second
home of Holland House.
"I dined with her whenever I liked. I had only to send word in
the morning that I would do so. Of course, I never uttered a word
at dinner, but listened with delight to the brilliant talk—to
Macaulay's eloquence and varied information, to Sydney Smith's
exquisite joke which made me die of laughing, to Roger's sarcasms
and Luttrell's repartees."
Frederick Leveson was called to the Bar in 1843, and went the Oxford
Circuit in the strangely-assorted company of G. S. Venables, J. G.
Phillimore, and E. V. Kenealy. This proved to be his last stage
in the anticipated progress towards the Woolsack. Lord Granville
died at the beginning of 1846, and the change which this event
produced in Frederick Leveson's position can best be described in
his own quaint words:
"My father was greatly beloved by us all, and was the most indulgent
parent—possibly too indulgent. Himself a younger son, although
I cannot say that his own case was a hard one, he sympathized with
me for being one of that unfortunate class. It may have been this
feeling, combined with much affection, that made him leave me well
provided for. I much question whether, if I had been left to earn my
own bread by my own exertions as a lawyer, I should have succeeded."
His friends had no difficulty in answering the question, and answering
it affirmatively; but the
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practical test was never applied, for on succeeding to his inheritance
he glided—"plunged" would be an unsuitable word—into
a way of living which was, more like the [Greek: scholae] of the
Athenian citizen than the sordid strife of professional activity.
He was singularly happy in private life, for the "Sacred Circle
of the Great-Grandmotherhood" contained some delightful women as
well as some distinguished men. Such was his sister-in-law Marie,
Lady Granville; such was his cousin Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland;
such was his mother, the Dowager Lady Granville; and such,
pre-eminently, was his sister, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, of whom a
competent critic said that, in the female characters of her novel
Ellen Middleton, she had drawn "the line which is so apt to
be overstepped, and which Walter Scott never clearly saw, between
naïveté and vulgarity." Myself a devoted adherent
of Sir Walter, I can yet recall some would-be pleasantries of Julia
Mannering, of Isabella Wardour, and even of Die Vernon, which would
have caused a shudder in the "Sacred Circle." Happiest of all was
Freddy Leveson in his marriage with Lady Margaret Compton; but
their married life lasted only five years, and left behind it a
memory too tender to bear translation to the printed page.
Devonshire House was the centre of Freddy Leveson's social life—at
least until the death of his uncle, the sixth Duke, in 1858. That
unsightly but comfortable mansion was then in its days of glory, and
those who frequented it had no reason to regret the past. "Poodle
Byng," who carried
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down to 1871 the social conditions of the eighteenth century, declared
that nothing could be duller than Devonshire House in his youth.
"It was a great honour to go there, but I was bored to death. The
Duchess was usually stitching in one corner of the room, and Charles
Fox snoring in another." Under the splendid but arbitrary rule of
the sixth Duke no one stitched or snored. Everyone who entered
his saloons was well-born or beautiful or clever or famous, and
many of the guests combined all four characteristics. When Prince
Louis Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III., first came to live in
London, his uncle Jerome asked the Duke of Devonshire to invite
his mauvais sujet of a nephew to Devonshire House, "so that
he might for once be seen in decent society"; and the Prince, repaid
the Duke by trying to borrow five thousand pounds to finance his
descent on Boulogne. But the Duke, though magnificent, was
business-like, and the Prince was sent empty away.
The society in which Freddy Leveson moved during his long career was
curiously varied. There was his own family in all its ramifications of
cousinship; and beyond its radius there was a circle of acquaintances
and associates which contained Charles Greville the diarist and
his more amiable brother Henry, Carlyle and Macaulay, Brougham
and Lyndhurst, J. A. Roebuck and Samuel Wilberforce, George Grote
and Henry Reeve, "that good-for-nothing fellow Count D'Orsay," and
Disraeli, "always courteous, but his courtesy sometimes overdone."
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For womankind there were Lady Morley the wit and Lady Cowper the
humorist, and Lady Ashburton, who tamed Carlyle; Lady Jersey, the
queen of fashion, and the two sister-queens of beauty, Lady Canning
and Lady Waterford; Lady Tankerville, who as a girl had taken refuge
in England from the matrimonial advances of the Comte d'Artois;
the three fascinating Foresters, Mrs. Robert Smith, Mrs. Anson,
and Lady Chesterfield; and Lady Molesworth and Lady Waldegrave,
who had climbed by their cleverness from the lowest rung of the
social ladder to a place not very far from the top.
Beyond this circle, again, there was a miscellaneous zone, where
dwelt politicians ranging from John Bright to Arthur Balfour; poets
and men of letters, such as Tennyson and Browning, Thackeray and
Motley and Laurance Oliphant; Paxton the gardener-architect and
Hudson the railway-king; stars of the musical world, such as Mario
and Grisi and Rachel; blue-stockings like Lady Eastlake and Madame
Mohl; Mademoiselle de Montijo, who captivated an Emperor, and Lola
Montez, who ruled a kingdom. No advantages of social education will
convert a fool or a bore or a prig or a churl into an agreeable member
of society; but, where Nature has bestowed a bright intelligence
and a genial disposition, her gifts are cultivated to perfection
by such surroundings as Frederick Leveson enjoyed in early life.
And so it came about that alike as a young man, in middle life
(which was in his case unusually prolonged), and in old
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age, he enjoyed a universal and unbroken popularity.
It is impossible to connect the memory of Freddy Leveson with the
idea of ambition, and it must therefore have been the praiseworthy
desire to render unpaid service to the public which induced him to
embark on the unquiet sea of politics. At a bye-election in the
summer of 1847 he was returned, through the interest of his uncle the
Duke of Devonshire, for Derby. A General Election immediately ensued;
he was returned again, but was unseated, with his colleague, for a
technical irregularity. In 1852 he was returned for Stoke-upon-Trent,
this time by the aid of his cousin the Duke of Sutherland (for the
"Sacred Circle" retained a good deal of what was termed "legitimate
influence"). In 1854, having been chosen to second the Address at
the opening of Parliament, he was directed to call on Lord John
Russell, who would instruct him in his duties. Lord John was the
shyest of human beings, and the interview was brief: "I am glad
you are going to second the Address. You will know what to say.
Good-morning."
At the General Election of 1857 he lost his seat for Stoke. "Poor
Freddy," writes his brother, Lord Granville, "is dreadfully disappointed
by his failure in the Potteries. He was out-jockeyed by Ricardo."
All who knew "poor Freddy" will easily realize that in a jockeying
contest he stood no chance. In 1859 he was returned for Bodmin, this
time by the good offices, not of relations, but of friends—Lord
Robartes and Lady Molesworth—and
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he retained the seat by his own merits till Bodmin ceased to be
a borough. Twice during his Parliamentary career Mr. Gladstone
offered him important office, and he declined it for a most
characteristic reason—"I feared it would be thought a job."
The gaps in his Parliamentary life were occupied by travelling.
As a young man he had been a great deal on the Continent, and he
had made what was then the adventurous tour of Spain. The winter
of 1850-1851 he spent in India; and in 1856 he accompanied his
brother Lord Granville (to whom he had been "précis-writer"
at the Foreign Office) on his Special Mission to St. Petersburg
for the Coronation of Alexander II. No chapter in his life was
fuller of vivid and entertaining reminiscences, and his mind was
stored with familiar memories of Radziwill, Nesselrode, and Todleben.
"Freddy," wrote his brother, "is supposed to have distinguished
himself greatly by his presence of mind when the Grande Duchesse
Hélène got deep into politics with him."
A travelling experience, which Freddy Leveson used to relate with
infinite gusto, belongs to a later journey, and had its origin in
the strong resemblance between himself and his brother. Except
that Lord Granville shaved, and that in later years Freddy Leveson
grew a beard, there was little facially to distinguish them. In 1865
Lord Granville was Lord President of the Council, and therefore,
according to the arrangement then prevailing, head of the Education
Office. In that year Matthew Arnold, then an Inspector of Schools, was
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despatched on a mission to enquire into the schools and Universities
of the Continent. Finding his travelling allowances insufficient
for his needs, he wrote home to the Privy Council Office requesting
an increase. Soon after he had despatched this letter, and before
he could receive the official reply, he was dining at a famous
restaurant in Paris, and he chose the most highly priced dinner of
the day. Looking up from his well-earned meal, he saw his official
chief, Lord Granville, who chanced to be eating a cheaper dinner.
Feeling that this gastronomical indulgence might, from the official
point of view, seem inconsistent with his request for increased
allowances, he stepped across to the Lord President, explained
that it was only once in a way that he thus compensated himself
for his habitual abstinence, and was delighted by the facile and
kindly courtesy with which his official chief received the
apologia. His delight was abated when he subsequently found
that he had been making his confession, not to Lord Granville,
but to Mr. Leveson-Gower.
Looking back from the close of life upon its beginning, Freddy
Leveson noted that as an infant he used to eat his egg "very slowly,
and with prolonged pleasure." "Did this," he used to ask, "portend
that I should grow up a philosopher or a gourmand? I certainly
did not become the former, and I hope not the latter." I am inclined
to think that he was both; for whoso understands the needs of the
body has mastered at least one great department of philosophy,
and he who feeds his fellow-men supremely
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well is in the most creditable sense of the word a gourmand.
Freddy Leveson's dinners were justly famous, and, though he modestly
observed that "hospitality is praised more than it deserves," no
one who enjoyed the labours of Monsieur Beguinot ever thought that
they could be overpraised. The scene of these delights was a house
in South Audley Street, which, though actually small, was so designed
as to seem like a large house in miniature; and in 1870 the genial
host acquired a delicious home on the Surrey hills, which commands
a view right across Sussex to the South Downs. "Holm-bury" is its
name, and "There's no place like Home-bury" became the grateful
watchword of a numerous and admiring society.
People distinguished in every line of life, and conspicuous by
every social charm, found at Holm-bury a constant and delightful
hospitality. None appreciated it more thoroughly than Mr. and Mrs.
Gladstone, whose friendship was one of the chief happinesses of
Freddy Leveson's maturer life. His link with them was Harriet,
Duchess of Sutherland, who, in spite of all Whiggish prejudices
against the half-converted Tory, was one of Gladstone's most
enthusiastic disciples. In "Cliveden's proud alcove," and in that
sumptuous villa at Chiswick where Fox and Canning died, Mr. and
Mrs. Gladstone were her constant guests; and there they formed
their affectionate intimacy with Freddy Leveson. Every year, and
more than once a year, they stayed with him at Holmbury; and one
at least of those visits was memorable. On
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the 19th of July, 1873, Mr. Gladstone wrote in his diary:
"Off at 4.25 to Holmbury, We were enjoying that beautiful spot
and expecting Granville with the Bishop of Winchester,[*] when
the groom arrived with the message that the Bishop had had a bad
fall. An hour and a half later Granville entered, pale and sad:
'It's all over.' In an instant the thread of that precious life
was snapped, We were all in deep and silent grief."
And now, for the sake of those who never knew Freddy Leveson, a
word of personal description must be added. He was of middle height,
with a slight stoop, which began, I fancy from the fact that he was
short-sighted and was obliged to peer rather closely at objects which
he wished to see. His growing deafness, which in later years was
a marked infirmity—he had no others—tended to intensify
the stooping habit, as bringing him nearer to his companions voice.
His features were characteristically those of the House of Cavendish,
as may be seen by comparing his portrait with that of his mother.
His expression was placid, benign, but very far from inert; for
his half-closed eyes twinkled with quiet mirth. His voice was soft
and harmonious, with just a trace of a lisp, or rather of that
peculiar intonation which is commonly described as "short-tongued."
His bearing was the very perfection of courteous ease, equally
remote from stiffness and from familiarity. His manners it would
be impertinent to eulogize, and the only dislikes which I ever
heard him express were directed
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against rudeness, violence, indifference to other people's feelings,
and breaches of social decorum. If by such offences as these it
was easy to displease him, it was no less easy to obtain his
forgiveness, for he was as amiable as he was refined. In old age
he wrote, with reference to the wish which some people express for
sudden death: "It is a feeling I cannot understand, as I myself
shall feel anxious before I die to take an affectionate leave of
those I love." His desire was granted, and there my story ends. I
have never known a kinder heart; I could not imagine a more perfect
gentleman.
SAMUEL WHITBREAD
The family of Whitbread enjoyed for several generations substantial
possessions in North Bedfordshire. They were of the upper middle
class, and were connected by marriage with John Howard the
Prison-Reformer, whose property near Bedford they inherited. As
years went on, their wealth and station increased. Samuel Whitbread,
who died in 1796, founded the brewery in Chiswell Street, E.C.,
which still bears his name, was Member for the Borough of Bedford,
and purchased from the fourth Lord Torrington a fine place near
Biggleswade, called Southill, of which the wooded uplands supplied
John Bunyan, dwelling on the flats of Elstow, with his idea of
the Delectable Mountains.
This Samuel Whitbread was succeeded as M.P.
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for Bedford by a more famous Samuel, his eldest son, who was born
in 1758, and married Lady Elizabeth Grey; sister of
"That Earl who taught his compeers to be just,
And wrought in brave old age what youth had planned."
Samuel Whitbread became one of the most active and influential
members of the Whig party, a staunch ally of Fox and a coadjutor
of Wilberforce in his attack on the Slave Trade. He was closely and
unfortunately involved in the affairs of Drury Lane Theatre, and,
for that reason, figures frequently in Rejected Addresses.
He died before his time in 1815, and his eldest son, William Henry
Whitbread, became M.P. for Bedford. This William Henry died without
issue, and his nephew and heir was the admirable man and distinguished
Parliamentarian who is here commemorated.
Samuel Whitbread was born in 1830, and educated at Rugby, where
he was a contemporary of Lord Goschen, and at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where one of his closest friends was James Payn, the
novelist. He married Lady Isabella Pelham, daughter of the third
Earl of Chichester. In those days Bedford returned two members,
and at the General Election of 1852, which scotched Lord Derby's
attempt to revive Protection, "Young Sam Whitbread" was returned
as junior Member for the Borough, and at the elections of 1857,
1859, 1865, 1868, 1874, 1880, 1885, 1886, and 1892 he was again
elected, each time after a contest and each time at the top of
the poll. Had he stood again in
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1895, and been again successful, he would have been "Father of the
House."
It may be said, without doubt or exaggeration, that Samuel Whitbread
was the ideal Member of Parliament. To begin with physical attributes,
he was unusually tall, carried himself nobly, and had a beautiful and
benignant countenance. His speaking was calm, deliberate, dignified;
his reasoning close and strong; and his style, though unadorned,
was perfectly correct. His truly noble nature shone through his
utterance, and his gentle humour conciliated the goodwill even of
political opponents. His ample fortune and large leisure enabled
him to devote himself to Parliamentary work, though the interests of
his brewery and of his landed estate were never neglected. He was
active in all local business, and had a singularly exact knowledge of
all that concerned his constituents, their personalities and desires.
A man thus endowed was clearly predestined for high office, and, in
1859 Lord Palmerston, who believed in political apprenticeship,
made Samuel Whitbread a Lord of the Admiralty. But this appointment
disclosed the one weak joint in the young politician's armour.
His circulation was not strong enough for his vast height, and
sedulous attention to the work of an office, superadded to the
normally unwholesome atmosphere of the House of Commons, was more
than he could stand. "I cannot," he said, "get a living out of
the London air;" and so in 1863, just on the threshold of high
preferment, he bade farewell to official ambition and devoted himself
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thence-forward to the work of a private Member. But the leaders of
the Liberal party did not resign such a recruit without repeated
efforts to retain him. Three times he refused the Cabinet and twice
the Speakership; while every suggestion of personal distinctions or
hereditary honours he waved aside with a smile.
The knowledge that these things were so gave Whit bread a peculiar
authority in the House of Commons. His independence was absolute
and assured. He was, if any politician ever was, unbuyable; and
though he was a sound Party man, on whom at a pinch his leaders
could rely, he yet seemed to rise superior to the lower air of
partisanship, and to lift debate into the atmosphere of conviction.
The St. James's Gazette once confessed that his peculiar
position in the House of Commons was one of those Parliamentary
mysteries which no outsider could understand. He seemed, even amid
the hottest controversies, to be rather an arbiter than an advocate.
Once Mr. T. W. Russell, in a moment of inspiration, described him
as "an umpire, perfectly impartial—except that he never gives
his own side out." Whereupon Whitbread, with a quaint half-smile,
whispered to the man sitting next to him: "That hit of 'T. W.'s' was
not very bad." A singular tribute to Whitbread's influence,
and the weight attaching to his counsel, is found in the fact that, in
the autumn of 1885, before Mr. Gladstone had announced his conversion
to Home Rule, Whitbread was one of the very few people (Goschen was
another) to whom he confided
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his change of view. Of the estimation in which Whitbread was held
by his neighbours, even after he had ceased to represent them in
Parliament, the present writer once heard a ludicrous, but illuminating,
instance. Among the men sentenced to death after the Jameson Raid
was one connected by ties of family with Bedford. For a while his
kinsfolk could not believe that he was really in danger; but, when
ominous rumours began to thicken, one of his uncles said, with an
air of grave resolve: "This is becoming serious about my nephew.
If it goes on much longer, I shall have to write to Mr. Whitbread."
In the general course of politics Whitbread was a Whig, holding
to the great principles of Civil and Religious Liberty, Peace,
Retrenchment, and Reform; but he was a Whig with a difference. He
stuck to the party after it had been permeated by Gladstonianism,
advanced in Liberalism as he advanced in years, and became a convinced
Home Ruler. His political prescience, founded on long experience
and close observation, was remarkable. Soon after Lord Salisbury's
accession to power in the summer of 1895, he said to the present
writer: "I fancy that for two or three years the Government will
go on quietly enough; and then, when they find their popularity
waning, they will pick a quarrel with somebody, and go to war.
It is always difficult for an Opposition to attack a Government
which is conducting a war, and I think Chamberlain is just the
man to take advantage of that difficulty."
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In religion Whitbread was an Evangelical of the more liberal type,
mistrusting extremes, and always on the friendliest terms with
Nonconformists. As regards the affairs of common life, he was a
most hospitable and courteous host; a thorough agriculturist, and
a keen sportsman. His size and weight debarred him from hunting,
but he was a first-rate shot, whether on the moor or in the stubble,
and a keen yachtsman. At home and abroad, everywhere and in all
things, he was a gentleman of the highest type, genial, dignified,
and unassuming. Probity, benevolence, and public spirit were embodied
in Samuel Whitbread.
HENRY MONTAGU BUTLER
The loved and honoured friend whose name stands at the head of
this section was the fourth son and, youngest child of Dr. George
Butler, Dean of Peterborough, and sometime Head Master of Harrow.
Montagu Butler was himself-educated at Harrow under Dr. Vaughan,
afterwards the well-known Master of the Temple, and proved to be
in many respects the ideal schoolboy. He won all the prizes for
composition, prose and verse, Greek, Latin, and English. He gained
the principal scholarship, and was Head of the School. Beside all
this, he was a member of the Cricket Eleven and made the highest
score for Harrow in the match against Eton at Lord's.
In July, 1851, Montagu Butler left Harrow, and
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in the following October entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a
Scholar. He won the Bell University Scholarship, the Battie University
Scholarship, the Browne Medal for a Greek Ode twice, the Camden
Medal, Porson Prize, and First Member's Prize for a Latin Essay,
and graduated as Senior Classic in 1855. Of such an undergraduate
career a Fellowship at Trinity was the natural sequel, but Butler
did not long reside at Cambridge. All through his boyhood and early
manhood he had set his heart on a political career. He had a minute
acquaintance with the political history of modern England, and his
memory was stored with the masterpieces of political eloquence.
In 1856 he accepted the post of Private Secretary to the Right Hon.
W. F. Cowper, afterwards Lord Mount Temple, and then President of the
Board of Health in Lord Palmerston's Administration. In this office
he served for two years, and then, retiring, he spent eleven months
in foreign travel, visiting in turn the Tyrol, Venice, the Danube,
Greece, Rome, Florence, and the Holy Land. During this period, he
changed his plan of life, and in September, 1859, he was ordained
Deacon by Bishop Lonsdale of Lichfield, on Letters Dimissory from
Bishop Turton of Ely. His title was his Fellowship; but it was
settled that the College should present him to the Vicarage of
Great St. Mary's, Cambridge; and till it was vacant he was to have
worked as a classical tutor in Trinity. Then came another change.
"Dr. Vaughan's retirement," he wrote, "from the Head Mastership of
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Harrow startled us. We all took quietly for granted that he would
stay on for years." However, this "startling" retirement took place,
and there was a general agreement among friends of the School that
Vaughan's favourite pupil, Montagu Butler, was the right man to
succeed him. Accordingly, Butler was elected in November, 1859,
though only twenty-six years old; and, with a view to the pastoral
oversight of Harrow School, he was ordained priest, again by Bishop
Lonsdale, at Advent, 1859.
In January, 1860, Montagu Butler entered on his new duties at Harrow,
and there he spent five-and-twenty years of happy, strenuous, and
serviceable life. He found 469 boys in the School; under his rule
the numbers increased till they reached 600.
Butler's own culture was essentially classical, for he had been
fashioned by Vaughan, who "thought in Greek," and he himself might
almost have been said to think and feel in Latin elegiacs. But his
scholarship was redeemed from pedantry by his wide reading, and
by his genuine enthusiasm for all that is graceful in literature,
modern as well as ancient. Under his rule the "grand, old, fortifying,
classical curriculum," which Matthew Arnold satirized, fought hard
and long for its monopoly; but gradually it had to yield. Butler's
first concession was to relax the absurd rule which had made Latin
versification obligatory on every boy in the School, whatever his
gifts or tastes. At the same time he introduced the regular teaching
of Natural Science, and in 1869 he created a
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"Modern Side." An even more important feature of his rule was the
official encouragement given to the study of music, which, from an
illicit indulgence practised in holes and corners, became, under
the energetic management of Mr. John Farmer, a prime element in
the life of the School.
In January, 1868, Butler admitted me to Harrow School. My father had
introduced me to him in the previous September, and I had fallen at
once under his charm. He was curiously unlike what one had imagined
a Head Master to be—not old and pompous and austere, but
young and gracious, friendly in manner, and very light in hand.
His leading characteristic was gracefulness. He was graceful in
appearance, tall and as yet slender; graceful in movement and gesture;
graceful in writing, and pre-eminently graceful in speech. He was
young—thirty-four—and looked younger, although (availing
himself of the opportunity afforded by an illness in the summer of
1867) he had just grown a beard. He had a keen sense of humour,
and was not afraid to display it before boys, although he was a
little pampered by a sense of the solemn reverence due not only
to what was sacred, but to everything that was established and
official. To breakfast with a Head Master is usually rather an
awful experience, but there was no awe about the pleasant meals
in Butler's dining-room (now the head Master's study), for he was
unaffectedly kind, overflowing with happiness, and tactful in adapting
his conversation to the capacities of his guests.
It was rather more alarming to face him at the
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periodical inspection of one's Form. ("Saying to the Head Master"
was the old phrase, then lapsing out of date.) We used to think
that he found a peculiar interest in testing the acquirements of
such boys as he knew personally, and of those whose parents were
his friends; so that on these occasions it was a doubtful privilege
to "know him," as the phrase is, "at home." Till one reached the
Sixth Form these social and official encounters with Butler were
one's only opportunities of meeting him at close quarters; but
every Sunday evening we heard him preach in the Chapel, and the
cumulative effect of his sermons was, at least in many cases, great.
They were always written in beautifully clear and fluent English,
and were often decorated with a fine quotation in prose or verse.
In substance they were extraordinarily simple, though not childish.
For example, he often preached on such practical topics as Gambling,
National Education; and the Housing of the Poor, as well as on
themes more obviously and directly religious. He was at his best
in commemorating a boy who had died in the School, when his genuine
sympathy with sorrow made itself unmistakably felt. But whatever
was the subject, whether public or domestic, he always treated it
in the same simply Christian spirit. I know from his own lips that
he had never passed through those depths of spiritual experience
which go to make a great preacher; but his sermons revealed in
every sentence a pure, chivalrous, and duty-loving heart. One of
his intimate friends once spoke of his "Arthur-like"
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character, and the epithet was exactly right.
His most conspicuous gift was unquestionably his eloquence. His
fluency, beauty of phrase, and happy power of turning "from grave
to gay, from lively to severe," made him extraordinarily effective
on a platform or at a social gathering. Once (in the autumn of
1870) he injured his right arm, and so was prevented from writing
his sermons. For three or four Sundays he preached extempore, and
even boys who did not usually care for sermons were fascinated
by his oratory.
In the region of thought I doubt if he exercised any great influence.
To me he never seemed to have arrived at his conclusions by any
process of serious reasoning. He held strongly and conscientiously a
certain number of conventions—a kind of Palmerstonian Whiggery,
a love of "spirited foreign policy;" an admiration for the military
character, an immense regard for the Crown, for Parliament, and
for all established institutions (he was much shocked when the
present Bishop of Oxford spoke in the Debating Society in favour of
Republicanism); and in every department of life he paid an almost
superstitious reverence to authority. I once ventured to tell him
that even a beadle was a sacred being in his eyes, and he did not
deny the soft impeachment.
His intellectual influence was not in the region of thought, but
in that of expression. His scholarship was essentially literary. He
had an instinctive and unaffected love of all that was beautiful,
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whether in prose or verse, in Greek, Latin, or English. His reading
was wide and thorough. Nobody knew Burke so well, and he had a
contagious enthusiasm for Parliamentary oratory. In composition
he had a curiosa felicitas in the strictest meaning of the
phrase; for his felicity was the product of care. To go through
a prize-exercise with him was a real joy, so generous was his
appreciation, so fastidious his taste, so dexterous his substitution
of the telling for the ineffective word, and so palpably genuine
his enjoyment of the business.
As a ruler his most noticeable quality was his power of discipline.
He was feared—and a Head Master who is not feared is not
fit for his post; and by bad boys he was hated, and by most good
boys he was loved. By most, but not by all. There were some, even
among the best, who resented his system of minute regulation, his
"Chinese exactness" in trivial detail, his tendency to treat the
tiniest breach of a School rule as if it were an offence against
the moral law.
I think it may be said, in general terms, that those who knew him
best loved him most. He had by nature a passionate temper, but
it was grandly controlled, and seldom, if ever, led him into an
injustice. His munificence in giving was unequalled in my experience.
He was the warmest and staunchest of friends; through honour and
dishonour, storm and sunshine, weal or woe, always and exactly the
same. His memory for anything associated with his pupils careers
was extraordinarily
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retentive, and he was even passionately loyal to Auld Lang Syne.
And there is yet another characteristic which claims emphatic mention
in any attempt to estimate his influence. He was conspicuously and
essentially a gentleman. In appearance, manner, speech, thought,
and act, this gentlemanlike quality of his nature made itself felt;
and it roused in such as were susceptible of the spell an admiration
which the most meritorious teachers have often, by sheer boorishness
forfeited.
Time out of mind, a Head Mastership has been regarded as a
stepping-stone to a Bishopric—with disastrous results to the
Church—and in Butler's case it seemed only too likely that
the precedent would be followed. Gladstone, when Prime Minister,
once said to a Harrovian colleague, "What sort of Bishop would your
old master, Dr. Butler, make?" "The very worst," was the reply.
"He is quite ignorant of the Church, and would try to discipline
his clergy like school-boys. But there is one place for which he
is peculiarly qualified—the Mastership of Trinity." And the
Prime Minister concurred. In June, 1885, Gladstone was driven from
office, and was succeeded by Lord Salisbury. In October, 1886, the
Master of Trinity (Dr. W. H. Thompson) died, and Salisbury promptly
offered the Mastership to Dr. Butler, who had for a year been Dean
of Gloucester. It is not often that a man is designated for the
same great post by two Prime Ministers of different politics.
At Trinity, though at first he had to live down
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certain amount of jealousy and ill-feeling, Butler's power and
influence increased steadily from year to year, and towards the end
he was universally respected and admired. A resident contemporary
writes: "He was certainly a Reformer, but not a violent one. His
most conspicuous services to the College were, in my opinion, these:
(1) Sage guidance of the turbulent and uncouth democracy of which
a College Governing body consists. (2) A steady aim at the highest
in education, being careful to secure the position of literary
education from the encroachments of science and mathematics. (3)
Affectionate stimulus to all undergraduates who need it, especially
Old Harrovians. (4) The maintenance of the dignity and commanding
position of Trinity and consequently of the University in the world
at large."
To Cambridge generally Butler endeared himself by his eager interest
in all good enterprises, by his stirring oratory and persuasive
preaching, and by his lavish hospitality. As Vice-Chancellor, in
1889 and 1890, he worthily maintained the most dignified traditions
of academical office. Those who knew him both on the religious
and on the social side will appreciate the judgment said to have
been pronounced by Canon Mason, then Master of Pembroke: "Butler
will be saved, like Rahab, by hospitality and faith."
BASIL WILBERFORCE[*]
In the House of God the praise of man should always be restrained.
I, therefore, do not propose to obey the natural instinct which
would prompt me to deliver a copious eulogy of the friend whom we
commemorate—an analysis of his character or a description
of his gifts.
But, even in church, there is nothing out of place in an attempt to
recall the particular aspects of truth which presented themselves
with special force to a particular mind. Rather, it is a dutiful
endeavour to acknowledge the gifts, whether in the way of spiritual
illumination or of practical guidance, which God gave us through
His servant; and, it is on some of those aspects as they presented
themselves to the mind of Basil Wilberforce that I propose to
speak—not, indeed, professing to treat them exhaustively,
but bearing in mind that true saying of Jeremy Taylor: "In this
world we believe in part and prophesy in part; and this imperfection
shall never be done away, till we be transplanted to a more glorious
state."
1. I cannot doubt about the point which should be put most prominently.
Wilberforce's most conspicuous characteristic was his vivid apprehension
of the Spiritual World. His eyes, like Elisha's, were always open to
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see "the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire." Incorporeal
presences were to him at least as real as those which are embodied
in flesh and blood. Material phenomena were the veils of spiritual
realities; and "the powers of the world to come" were more actual
and more momentous than those which operate in time and space.
Perhaps the most important gift which God gave to the Church through
his ministry was his lifelong testimony against the darkness of
Materialism.
2. Second only to his keen sense of the Unseen World was his conviction
of God's love.
Other aspects of the Divine Nature as it is revealed to
us—Almightiness, Justice, Awfulness (though, of course, he
recognized them all)—did not colour his heart and life as
they were coloured by the sense of the Divine Love. That Love seemed
to him to explain all the mysteries of existence, to lift
"the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world";
to make its dark places light, its rough places plain, its hard
things easy, even its saddest things endurable. His Gospel was
this: God, Who made us in His own Image, loves us like a Father;
and therefore, in life and in death, in time and in eternity, all
is, and must be, well.
3. "He prayeth best, who lovest best
All things both great and small.
For the dear God Who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."
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Those familiar words of Coleridge perfectly express Wilberforce's
attitude towards his fellow-creatures, and when I say
"fellow-creatures," I am not thinking only of his brothers and sisters
in the human family.
He was filled with a God-like love of all that God has made. Hatred
and wrath and severity were not "dreamt of" in his "philosophy."
Towards the most degraded and abandoned of the race he felt as
tenderly as St. Francis felt towards the leper on the roadside
at Assisi, when he kissed the scarred hand, and then found that,
all unwittingly, he had ministered to the Lord, disguised in that
loathsome form. This was the motive which impelled Wilberforce
to devote himself, uncalculatingly and unhesitatingly, to the
reclamation of lives that had been devastated by drunkenness, and
which stimulated his zeal for all social and moral reforms.
But his love extended far beyond the bounds of the human family;
and (in this again resembling St. Francis) he loved the birds and
beasts which God has provided as our companions in this life, and
perhaps—for aught we know—in the next. In a word, he
loved all God's creatures for God's sake.
4. No one had a keener sense of the workings of the Holy Spirit
in regions beyond the precincts of all organized religion; and
yet, in his own personal heart and life, Wilberforce belonged
essentially to the Church of England. It is difficult to imagine him
happy and content in any communion except our own. Nowhere else could
he have found that unbroken chain which links us to Catholic antiquity
Page 156
and guarantees the validity of our sacraments, combined with that
freedom of religious speculation and that elasticity of devotional
forms which were to him as necessary as vital air. Various elements
of his teaching, various aspects of his practice will occur to
different minds; but (just because it is sometimes overlooked) I
feel bound to remind you of his testimony to the blessings which
he had received through Confession, and to the glory of the Holy
Eucharist, as the Sun and Centre of Catholic worship. His conviction
of the reality and nearness of the spiritual world gave him a singular
ease and "access" in intercessory prayer, and his love of humanity
responded to that ideal of public worship which is set forth in
John Inglesant: "The English Church, as established by the
law of England, offers the Supernatural to all who choose to come.
It is like the Divine Being Himself, Whose sun shines alike on
the evil and on the good."
5. In what theology did Wilberforce, whose adult life had been
one long search for truth, finally repose? Assuredly he never lost
his hold on the central facts of the Christian revelation as they
are stated in the creed of Nicæa and Constantinople. Yet,
as years went on, he came to regard them less and less in their
objective aspect; more and more as they correspond to the work
of the Spirit in the heart and conscience. Towards the end, all
theology seemed to be for him comprehended in the one doctrine
of the Divine Immanence, and to find its natural expression in
that significant phrase of St. Paul: "Christ in you, the hope of
glory."
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Spiritually-minded men do not, as a rule, talk much of their spiritual
experiences; but, if one had asked Wilberforce to say what he regarded
as the most decisive moment of his religious life, I can well believe
that he would have replied, "The moment when 'it pleased God to
reveal His Son in me.'"
The subject expands before us, as is always the case when we meditate
on the character and spirit of those whom we have lost; and I must
hasten to a close.
I have already quoted from a writer with whom I think Wilberforce
would have felt a close affinity, though, as a matter of fact, I
never heard him mention that writer's name; I mean J. H. Shorthouse;
and I return to the same book—the stimulating story of John
Inglesant—for my concluding words, which seem to express,
with accidental fidelity, the principle of Wilberforce's spiritual
being: "We are like children, or men in a tennis-court, and before
our conquest is half-won, the dim twilight comes and stops the
game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above all hold
fast by the law of life we feel within. This was the method which
Christ followed, and He won the world by placing Himself in harmony
with that law of gradual development which the Divine wisdom has
planned. Let us follow in His steps, and we shall attain to the
ideal life; and, without waiting for our mortal passage, tread
the free and spacious streets of that Jerusalem which is above."
EDITH SICHEL
This notice is more suitably headed with a name than with a title.
Edith Sichel was greater than anything she wrote, and the main
interest of the book before us[*] is the character which it reveals.
Among Miss Sichel's many activities was that of reviewing, and Mr.
Bradley tells that "her first object was to let the reader know
what kind of matter he might expect to find in the book, and, if
necessary, from what point of view it is treated there." Following this
excellent example, let us say that in New and Old the reader
will find an appreciative but not quite adequate "Introduction"; some
extracts from letters; some "thoughts" or aphorisms; some poems;
and thirty-two miscellaneous pieces of varying interest-and merit.
This is what we "find in the book," and the "point of view" is
developed as we read.
To say that the Introduction is not quite adequate is no aspersion
on Mr. Bradley. He tells us that he only knew Miss Sichel "towards
the close of her life" (she was born in 1862 and died in 1914), and
in her case pre-eminently the child was mother of the woman. Her
blood was purely Jewish, and the Jewish characteristic of precocity
was conspicuous in her from the first. At ten she had the intellectual
alertness of sixteen, and at sixteen she could have held her own
with ordinary people of
Page 159
thirty. To converse with her even casually always reminded me of
Matthew Arnold's exclamation: "What women these Jewesses are! with a
force which seems to triple that of the women of our Western
and Northern races."
From the days of early womanhood to the end, Edith Sichel led a
double life, though in a sense very different from that in which
this ambiguous phrase is generally employed. "She was known to the
reading public as a writer of books and of papers in magazines....
Her principal books were warmly praised by judges competent to estimate
their value as contributions to French biography and history;" and
her various writings, belonging to very different orders and ranging
over a wide variety of topics, were always marked by vigour and
originality. Her versatility was marvellous; and, "though she had
not in youth the severe training that makes for perfect accuracy,"
she had by nature the instinct which avoids the commonplace, and
which touches even hackneyed themes with light and fire. Her humour
was exuberant, unforced, untrammelled; it played freely round every
object which met her mental gaze—sometimes too freely when
she was dealing with things traditionally held sacred. But her
flippancy was of speech rather than of thought, for her fundamental
view of life was serious. "Life, in her view, brings much that
is pure and unsought joy, more, perhaps, that needs transforming
effort, little or nothing that cannot be made to contribute to
an inward and abiding happiness."
Page 160
Some more detailed account of her literary work may be given later
on; at this point I must turn to the other side of her double life.
She was only twenty-two when she began her career of practical
benevolence among the poor girls of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and
Shadwell. She established in the country Homes for the girl-children
of an East End work-house, and maintained them till she died. For
twenty-two years she was treasurer of a Boys' Home. She was a manager
of Elementary Schools in London. She held a class for female prisoners
at Holloway. She was deeply impressed by the importance of starting
young people in suitable employment, and threw all her energies
into the work, "in case of need, supplying the money required for
apprenticeship." In this and in all her other enterprises she was
generous to a fault, always being ready to give away half her
income—and yet not "to a fault," for her strong administrative
and financial instinct restrained her from foolish or mischievous
expenditure. All this work, of body and mind, was done in spite
of fragile health and frequent suffering; yet she never seemed
overburdened, or fussed, or flurried, and those who enjoyed her
graceful hospitality in Onslow Gardens would never have suspected
either that her day had been spent in what she called "the picturesque
mire of Wapping," or that she had been sitting up late at night,
immersed in Human Documents from the Four Centuries preceding
the Reformation.
We have spoken of her humour. Those who would see a sample of it
are referred to her description
Page 161
of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and this piece of pungent fun may be
profitably read in contrast with her grim story of Gladys Leonora
Pratt. In that story some of the writer's saddest experiences
in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet
has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good
an artist to be needlessly disgusting. "It might," she said, "be
well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not
the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage."
She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance,
on which she became an acknowledged authority. She was less well
known, but not less effective, as a reviewer—no one ever
dissected Charlotte Yonge so justly—and she excelled in personal
description. Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary
Coleridge, and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization.
All her literary work was based on a wide and strong foundation of
generous culture. German was to her a second mother-tongue, and
she lectured delightfully on Faust. Though she spoke of
herself as talking "fluent and incomprehensible bad French," she
was steeped in French scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles
under the stimulating guidance of William Cory, and her love of
Italy had taught her a great deal of Italian. The authors whom she
enjoyed and quoted were a motley crowd—Dante and Rabelais,
Pascal and Montaigne, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and
George Borrow, "Mark Rutherford"
Page 162
and Samuel Butler, Fénelon and Renan and Anatole France. Her
vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some
young girls she said: "We all think a great deal of the importance
of opening our windows and airing our rooms. I wish we thought
as much of airing our imaginations. To me poetry is quite like
that. It is like opening the window daily, and looking out and
letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little
room; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more
uncomfortable than I can tell you." She might have put the case
more strongly; for poetry, and music, and painting, and indeed all
art at its highest level, made a great part of her religion. Her
family had long ago conformed to the Church of England, in which
she was brought up; but she never shook off her essential Judaism.
She had no sympathy with rites or ordinances, creeds or dogmas,
and therefore outward conformity to the faith of her forefathers
would have been impossible to her; but she looked with reverent
pride on the tombs in the Jewish cemetery at Prague. "It gave me
a strange feeling to stand at the tombstone of our tribe—900
A.D. The oldest scholar's grave is 600 A.D., and Heaven knows how
many great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten. The wind
and the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all the melancholy
of my race seemed to rise up and answer them." Though she was a
Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined
Unitarianism. "The Immanence of God and the life of Christ are my
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treasures." "I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that
all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the
same band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred
Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom
she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church of
England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a joyless
curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the Athanasian
Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church" filled
with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But the
conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable—"All the
clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God."
"WILL" GLADSTONE
"He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name
which the Christian world venerates." The words were originally
used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father,
the emancipator of the negro. I venture to apply them to the great
man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the
more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered
quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, "rather
for what he was than for what he did." He was, in Lord Salisbury's
words, "an example, to which history
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hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian, Statesman." It
was no light matter for a boy of thirteen to inherit a name which
had been so nobly borne for close on ninety years, and to acquire,
as soon as he came of age, the possession of a large and difficult
property, and all the local influence which such ownership implies.
Yet this was the burden which was imposed on "Will" Gladstone by
his father's untimely death. After an honourable career at Eton
and Oxford, and some instructive journeyings in the East and in
America (where he was an attaché at the British Embassy),
he entered Parliament as Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs. His
Parliamentary career was not destined to be long, but it was in
many respects remarkable.
In some ways he was an ideal candidate. He was very tall, with a
fair complexion and a singular nobility of feature and bearing.
To the most casual observer it was palpable that he walked the
world
"With conscious step of purity and pride."
People interested in heredity tried to trace in him some resemblance
to his famous grandfather; but, alike in appearance and in character,
the two were utterly dissimilar. In only one respect they resembled
each other, and that was the highest. Both were earnest and practical
Christians, walking by a faith which no doubts ever disturbed,
and serving God in the spirit and by the methods of the English
Church. And here we see alike Will Gladstone's qualifications and
his drawbacks as a candidate for
Page 165
a Scottish constituency. His name and his political convictions
commended him to the electors; his ecclesiastial opinions they
could not share. His uprightness of character and nobility of aspect
commanded respect; his innate dislike of popularity-hunting and
men-pleasing made him seem for so young a man—he was only
twenty-seven—austere and aloof. Everyone could feel the intensity
of his convictions on the points on which he had made up his mind;
some were unreasonably distressed when he gave expression to that
intensity by speech and vote. He was chosen to second the Address at
the opening of the Session of 1912, and acquitted himself, as always,
creditably; but it was in the debates on the Welsh Disestablishment
Bill that he first definitely made his mark. "He strongly supported
the principle, holding that it had been fully justified by the
results of the Irish Disestablishment Act on the Irish Church.
But, as in that case, generosity should characterize legislation;
disendowment should be clearly limited to tithes. Accordingly, in
Committee, he took an independent course. His chief speech on this
subject captivated the House. For a very young Member to oppose
his own party without causing irritation, and to receive the cheers
of the Opposition without being led to seek in them solace for
the silence of his own side, and to win general admiration by
transparent sincerity and clear, balanced statement of reason, was
a rare and notable performance."
When Will Gladstone struck twenty-nine, there were few young men
in England who occupied
Page 166
a more enviable position. He had a beautiful home; sufficient,
but not overwhelming, wealth; a property which gave full scope
for all the gifts of management and administration which he might
possess; the devoted love of his family, and the goodwill even of
those who did not politically agree with him. His health, delicate
in childhood, had improved with years. "While he never neglected his
public duties, his natural, keen, healthy love of nature, sport,
fun, humour, company, broke out abundantly. In these matters he
was still a boy"—but a boy who, as it seemed, had already
crossed the threshold of a memorable manhood. Such was Will Gladstone
on his last birthday—the 12th of July, 1914. A month later
the "Great Tribulation" had burst upon the unthinking world, and
all dreams of happiness were shattered. Dreams of happiness, yes;
but not dreams of duty. Duty might assume a new, a terrible, and an
unlooked-for form; but its essential and spiritual part—the
conviction of what a man owes to God, to his fellow-men, and to
himself—became only more imperious when the call to arms
was heard: Christus ad arma vocat.
Will Gladstone loved peace, and hated war with his whole heart.
He was by conviction opposed to intervention in the quarrels of
other nations. "His health was still delicate; he possessed neither
the training nor instincts of a soldier; war and fighting were
repugnant to his whole moral and physical fibre." No one, in short,
could have been by nature less disposed for the duty which
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now became urgent. "The invasion of Belgium shattered his hopes
and his ideals." He now realized the stern truth that England must
fight, and, if England must fight, he must bear his part in the
fighting. He had been made, when only twenty-six, Lord-Lieutenant
of Flintshire, and as such President of the Territorial Force
Association. It was his official duty to "make personal appeals
for the enlistment of young men. But how could he urge others to
join the Army while he, a young man not disqualified for military
service, remained at home in safety? It was his duty to lead, and
his best discharge of it lay in personal example." His decision
was quickly and quietly made. "He was the only son of his mother,
and what it meant to her he knew full well;" but there was no
hesitation, no repining, no looking back. He took a commission in
the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and on the 15th
of March, 1915, he started with a draft for France. On the 12th
of April he was killed. "It is not"—he had just written to
his mother—"the length of existence, that counts, but what
is achieved during that existence, however short." These words
of his form his worthiest epitaph.
LORD CHARLES RUSSELL
A man can have no better friend than a good father; and this
consideration warrants, I hope, the inclusion of yet one more sketch
drawn "in honour of friendship."
Charles James Fox Russell (1807-1894) was the sixth son of the sixth
Duke of Bedford. His mother was Lady Georgiana Gordon, daughter
of the fourth Duke of Gordon and of the adventurous "Duchess Jane,"
who, besides other achievements even more remarkable, raised the
"Gordon Highlanders" by a method peculiarly her own. Thus he was
great-great-great-grandson of the Whig martyr, William, Lord Russell,
and great-nephew of Lord George Gordon, whose Protestant zeal excited
the riots of 1780. He was one of a numerous family, of whom the best
remembered are John, first Earl Russell, principal author of the
Reform Act of 1832, and Louisa, Duchess of Abercorn, grandmother
of the present Duke.
Charles James Fox was a close friend, both politically and privately,
of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, and he promised them that he
would be godfather to their next child; but he died before the
child was born, whereupon his nephew, Lord Holland, took over the
sponsorship, and named his godson "Charles James Fox." The child
was born in 1807, and his birthplace was Dublin Castle.[*]
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The Duke of Bedford was then Viceroy of Ireland, and became involved
in some controversy because he refused to suspend the Habeas Corpus
Act. When Lord Charles Russell reached man's estate, he used, half
in joke but quite half in-earnest, to attribute his lifelong sympathy
with the political demands of the Irish people to the fact that
he was a Dublin man by birth.
The Duke of Bedford was one of the first Englishmen who took a
shooting in Scotland (being urged thereto by his Highland Duchess);
and near his shooting-lodge a man who had been "out" with Prince
Charlie in 1745 was still living when Charles Russell first visited
Speyside. Westminster was the Russells' hereditary school, and
Charles Russell was duly subjected to the austere discipline which
there prevailed. From the trials of gerund-grinding and fagging
and flogging a temporary relief was afforded by the Coronation of
George IV., at which he officiated as Page to the acting Lord Great
Chamberlain. It was the last Coronation at which the procession was
formed in Westminster Hall and moved across to the Abbey. Young
Russell, by mischievousness or carelessness, contrived to tear
his master's train from the ermine cape which surmounted it; and
the procession was delayed till a seamstress could be found to
repair the damage. "I contrived to keep that old rascal George
IV. off the throne for half an hour," was Lord Charles-Russell's
boast in maturer age.[*]
Page 170
From Westminster Lord Charles passed to the University of Edinburgh,
where his brother John had preceded him. He boarded with Professor
Pillans, whom Byron gibbeted as "paltry"[*] in "English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers," and enjoyed the society of the literary circle
which in those days made Edinburgh famous. The authorship of the
Waverley Novels was not yet revealed, and young Russell had the
pleasure of discussing with Sir Walter Scott the dramatic qualities
of The Bride of Lammermoor. He was, perhaps, less unfitted
for such high converse than most lads would be, because, as Lord
Holland's godson, he had been from his schooldays a frequenter
of Holland House in its days of glory.[**]
On leaving Edinburgh, Lord Charles Russell joined the Blues, then
commanded by Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King of Hanover;
and he was able to confirm, by personal knowledge, the strange
tales of designs which the Duke entertained for placing himself or
his son upon the throne of England.[*] He subsequently exchanged
into the 52nd Light Infantry, from which he retired, with
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the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, in order to enter Parliament. In
December, 1832, he was returned at the head of the poll for
Bedfordshire, and on Christmas Eve a young lady (who in 1834 became
his wife) wrote thus to her sister:
"Lord Charles Russell is returned for this County. The Chairing,
Dinner, etc., take place to-day. Everybody is interested about
him, as he is very young and it is his first appearance in the
character. His speeches have delighted the whole County, and he
is, of course, very much pleased." This faculty of public speaking
was perhaps his most remarkable endowment. He had an excellent
command of cultivated English, a clear and harmonious voice, a keen
sense of humour, and a happy knack of apt quotation.
On the 23rd of February, 1841, Disraeli wrote, with reference to
an impending division on the Irish Registration Bill: "The Whigs
had last week two hunting accidents; but Lord Charles Russell,
though he put his collar-bone out, and we refused to pair him,
showed last night." He sate for Bedfordshire till the dissolution
of that year, when he retired, feeling that Free Trade was indeed
bound to come, but that it would be disastrous for the agricultural
community which he represented. "Lord Charles Russell," wrote Cobden,
"is the man who opposed even his brother John's fixed duty, declaring
at the time that it was to throw two millions of acres out of
cultivation." He returned to Parliament for a brief space in 1847, and
was then appointed Serjeant-at-Arms—not, as he always insisted,
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"Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons," but "one of the Queen's
Serjeants-at-Arms, directed by her to attend on the Speaker during
the sitting of Parliament." In 1873 the office and its holder were
thus described by "Jehu Junior" in Vanity Fair:
"For the filling of so portentous an office, it is highly important
that one should be chosen who will, by personal mien and bearing
not less than by character, detract nothing from its dignity. Such
a one is Lord Charles Russell, who is a worthy representative of
the great house of Bedford from which he springs.
"For a quarter of a century he has borne the mace before successive
Speakers. From his chair he has listened to Peel, to Russell, to
Palmerston, to Disraeli, and to Gladstone, and he still survives
as a depository of their eloquence. He is himself popular beyond
the fair expectations of one who has so important a part to play
in the disciplinary arrangements of a popular assembly; for he
is exceptionally amiable and genial by nature, is an excellent
sportsman, and has cultivated a special taste for letters.[*] It
is rarely that in these times
Page 173
a man can be found so thoroughly fitted to fill an office which
could be easily invested with ridicule, or so invariably to invest
it, as he has, with dignity."
Sir George Trevelyan writes: "You can hardly imagine how formidable
and impressive Lord Charles seemed to the mass of Members, and
especially to the young; and how exquisite and attractive was the
moment when he admitted you to his friendly notice, and the absolute
assurance that, once a friend, he would be a friend for ever."
Lord Charles Russell held the Serjeancy till 1875; and at this point
I had better transcribe the record in Hansard:
Monday, April 5, 1875:
Mr. Speaker acquainted the House that he had received from Lord
Charles James Fox Russell the following letter:
HOUSE OF COMMONS,
April 5th, 1875.
SIR,
I have the honour to make application to you that you will be pleased
to sanction my retirement from my office, by Patent, of Her Majesty's
Serjeant-at-Arms attending the Speaker of the House of Commons.
I have held this honourable office for twenty-seven years, and
I feel that the time is come when it is desirable that I should
no longer retain it.
I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your very obedient servant,
CHARLES J. F. RUSSELL,
Serjeant-at-Arms.
THE RIGHT HONBLE. THE SPEAKER.
Page 174
Thursday, April 8, 1875:
Mr. DISRAELI: I beg to move, Sir, that the letter addressed to
you by Lord Charles Russell, the late Serjeant-at-Arms, be read
by the Clerk at the Table.
Letter [5th April] read.
Mr. DISRAELI: Mr. Speaker, we have listened to the resignation of
his office by one who has long and ably served this House. The office
of Serjeant-at-Arms is one which requires no ordinary qualities; for
it requires at the same time patience, firmness, and suavity, and
that is a combination of qualities more rare than one could wish
in this world. The noble Lord who filled the office recently, and
whose resignation has just been read at the Table, has obtained our
confidence by the manner in which he has discharged his duties through
an unusually long period of years; and we should remember, I think,
that occasions like the present are almost the only opportunity we
have of expressing our sense of those qualities, entitled so much
to our respect, which are possessed and exercised by those who fill
offices attached to this House, and upon whose able fulfilment of
their duties much of our convenience depends. Therefore, following
the wise example of those who have preceded me in this office,
I have prepared a Resolution which expresses the feeling of the
House on this occasion, and I now place it, Sir, in your hands.
Mr. Speaker, read the Resolution, as follows: "That Mr. Speaker
be requested to acquaint Lord Charles James Fox Russell that this
House entertains a just sense of the exemplary manner
Page 175
in which he has uniformly discharged the duties of the Office of
Serjeant-at-Arms during his long attendance on this House."
The MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON: Sir, on behalf of the Members who sit
on this side of the House, I rise to second the Motion of the Right
Hon. Gentleman. He has on more than one occasion gracefully, but
at the same time justly, recognized the services rendered to the
State by the house of Russell. That house will always occupy a
foremost place in the history of the Party to which I am proud
to belong, and I hope it will occupy no insignificant place in
the history of the country. Of that house the noble Lord who has
just resigned his office is no unworthy member. There are, Sir,
at the present moment but few Members who can recollect the time
when he assumed the duties of his office; but I am glad that his
resignation has been deferred long enough to enable a number of
new Members of this House to add their testimony to that of us
who are better acquainted with him, as to the invariable dignity
and courtesy with which he has discharged his duties.
The Resolution was adopted by the House, nemine contradicente.
Lord Charles now retired to his home at Woburn, Bedfordshire, where
he spent the nineteen years of his remaining life. He had always
been devoted to the duties and amusements of the county, and his two
main joys were cricket and hunting. He was elected to M.C.C. in 1827,
Page 176
and for twenty years before his death I had been its senior member.
Lilywhite once said to him: "For true cricket, give me bowling,
Pilch in, Box at the wicket, and your Lordship looking
on."[*] He was a good though uncertain shot, but in the saddle he
was supreme—a consummate horseman, and an unsurpassed judge
of a hound. He hunted regularly till he was eighty-one, irregularly
still later, and rode till his last illness began. Lord Ribblesdale
writes: "The last time I had the good fortune to meet your father
we went hunting together with the Oakley Hounds, four or five years
before his death. We met at a place called Cranfield Court, and
Lord Charles was riding a young mare, five years old—or was
she only four?—which kicked a hound, greatly to his disgust!
She was not easy to ride, nor did she look so, but he rode her
with the ease of long proficiency—not long years—and
his interest in all that goes to make up a day's hunting was as
full of zest and youth as I recollect his interest used to be in
all that made up a cricket-match in my Harrow days."
In religion Lord Charles Russell was an Evangelical, and he was
a frequent speaker on religious platforms. In politics he was an
ardent Liberal; always (except in that soon-repented heresy about
Free Trade) rather in advance of his party; a staunch adherent
of Mr. Gladstone, and a convinced advocate of Home Rule, though
he saw from the outset that the first Home Rule Bill, without
Chamberlain's support, was, as he said, "No go."
Page 177
He took an active part in electioneering, from the distant days
when, as a Westminster boy, he cheered for Sir Francis Burdett,
down to September, 1892, when he addressed his last meeting in
support of Mr. Howard Whitbread, then Liberal candidate for South
Bedfordshire. A speech which he delivered at the General Election
of 1886, denouncing the "impiety" of holding that the Irish were
incapable of self-government, won the enthusiastic applause of
Mr. Gladstone. When slow-going Liberals complained of too-rapid
reforms, he used to say: "When I was a boy, our cry was 'Universal
Suffrage, Triennial Parliaments, and the Ballot.' That was seventy
years ago, and we have only got one of the three yet."
In local matters, he was always on the side of the poor and the
oppressed, and a sturdy opponent of all aggressions on their rights.
"Footpaths," he wrote, "are a precious right of the poor, and
consequently much encroached on."
It is scarcely decent for a son to praise his father, but even a
son may be allowed to quote the tributes which his father's death
evoked. Let some of these tributes end my tale.
June 29th, 1894.
My DEAR G. RUSSELL,
I am truly grieved to learn this sad news. It is the disappearance
of an illustrious figure to us, but of much more, I fear, to you.
Yours most sincerely,
ROSEBERY.
Page 178
June 30th, 1894.
DEAR G. RUSSELL,
I saw with sorrow the announcement of your father's death. He was
a good and kind friend to me in the days long ago, and I mourn
his loss. In these backsliding days he set a great example of
steadfastness and loyalty to the faith of his youth and his race.
Yours very truly,
W. V. HARCOURT.
July 31rd 1894.
DEAR RUSSELL,
I was very grieved to hear of your revered father's death.
He was a fine specimen of our real aristocracy, and such specimens
are becoming rarer and rarer in these degenerate days.
There was a true ring of the "Grand Seigneur" about him which always
impressed me.
Yours sincerely,
REAY.
July 1st, 1894.
My DEAR RUSSELL,
I thank you very much for your kindness in writing to me.
You may, indeed, presume that it is with painful interest and deep
regret that I hear of the death of your father, and that I value
the terms in which you speak of his feelings towards myself.
Though he died at such an advanced age, it is, I think, remarkable
that his friends spoke of him to the last as if he were still in
the full intercourse of daily life, without the disqualification
or forgetfulness that old age sometimes brings with it.
Page 179
For my part I can never forget my association with him in the House
of Commons and elsewhere, nor the uniform kindness which he always
showed me.
Believe me, most truly yours,
ARTHUR W. PEEL.
June 29th, 1894.
My DEAR RUSSELL,
I have seen, with the eyes of others, in newspapers of this afternoon
the account of the death—shall I say?—or of the ingathering
of your father. And of what he was to you as a father I can reasonably,
if remotely, conceive from knowing what he was in the outer circle,
as a firm, true, loyal friend.
He has done, and will do, no dishonour to the name of Russell. It
is a higher matter to know, at a supreme moment like this, that
he had placed his treasure where moth and dust do not corrupt, and
his dependence where dependence never fails. May he enjoy the rest,
light, and peace of the just until you are permitted to rejoin him.
With growing years you will feel more and more that here everything
is but a rent, and that it is death alone which integrates.
On Monday I hope to go to Pitlochrie, N. B., and in a little time
to return southward, and resume, if it please God, the great gift
of working vision.
Always and sincerely yours,
W. E. GLADSTONE.